= CNI = CO •CD CO THE SKEPTICS OF THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE rxiFoit.M \vrrn YV//X VOLT MI:, THE SKEPTICS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. Uy ,T"iiN ()\VK.N. THE CIVILIZATION OF THE RE NAISSANCE IN ITALY. I5y I )]•. ,l.\(iiit l>ri;i KiiAiini. Triuisljiti'd l>\' S. ( ! . ( '. Mi inii. I:\MI; K. I-OXDON: SWAN SOXNKNSCHKIN' X (Hi. NKW VOKI. : MACMILLAN \ CO. , s , SEEN BY PRESERVATION SERVICES DATE. LONDON SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO. 1898 I'.r n.KR .V T\N.NI:I:, '1'llF. Sl.j.WOOl) I'lUNIl.XG U FKOMK, A.VD LONDON. INTRODUCTION. LITTLE need be added here to tlie Introductory remarks made in my companion volume on the Italian Skeptics. In this, as in the preceding volume, the interlocutors are the same, the intellectual and spiritual idiosyncrasies with which they are hypothetically credited are alike, the mode of treatment and other such literary attributes are more or less akin. A parallelism incidental and unconscious seems to characterize the two volumes. How far indeed it might be possible on some such plan as Plutarch's Parallel Lives to attempt a com parison of likeness or contrast between some of the chief personages in both volumes is a suggestion to which the truest response would be affirmative though its working out in detail would probably be attended with risk. Thus Dante and Pascal might be made to pair off as possessing some features and tendencies strikingly alike. Similarly Pulci and Mon taigne, Pomponazzi and Sanchez might be coupled and induced without much difficulty to go in intellectual double harness, just as, later on, we have, outside the scope of our immediate enquiry, such later parallelisms as those between Grioberti and Malebranche, and Rosmini and Maine de Biran. But the attempt, however easy in many respects, would not be altogether void of hazard, while its utility, except as an idle man's recreation, would be as manifest here as it is in most of Plutarch's variously assorted literary matches. viii Introduction. What seems more certain as well as more useful in a com parative retrospect of the two volumes is their aggregate lessons or issues ; chief est of these is the fact that the general scope of the earlier volume, and the free-thinking skeptics irregularly embraced by it, tends to the impairing, if not to the exhaustion, of Italian skepticism regarded as an evolu tionary process. With the death of Vanini the history of skeptical free-thought in Italy seems to come to an end. The 'Catholic Reaction,' as the movement has, with doubtful appropriateness, been described, had already set in. Popes and Church Councils on the one hand, the courts of princes, the recently awakened splendour of the nobility of France and Italy on the other; the aesthetic culture of academies and learned societies throughout Europe, — all these were causes which drew after them divers effects in harmony with the divine environments in which they operated. AVhile in Italy they combined partly to dwindle, partly to confine to a narrower grove the outspoken skepticism of e.g. such thinkers as Pomponazzi and Vanini, in France their operation partook of a broader, more expansive, more heterogeneous character. Thus Italy, which had been the foremost to occupy the field of the European Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, resigns in the latter half of the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries its supremacy to France. The skepticism which, with Giordano Bruno as its prophet, it had diffused over Europe became more and more idealistic in its character. So much was this the case that it accomplished, so to speak, the complete circle of physical and metaphysical research and again became dogmatic and doctrinaire. It is curious and anomalous, but it is nevertheless true, that Gioberti and Rosmini are the intellectual and spiritual sons of Giordano Bruno; at least they are his step-children, the offspring of one true, one supposititious parent. The natural outcome of this philosophical genealogy is manifold. Not only have the professorial chairs in the Italian Introduction. i-x Universities during the seventeenth century been filled by Hegelians, but the free-thought that starts from the Renais- °r^ico has produced outcomes no less remarkable in other directions of culture and enlightenment. Thus the naturalism of e.g. such writers as Marino has frequently tended to dog matic negation, while this in its turn, as in the case of Leopard i, has degenerated into extreme pessimism. But the evolution in these and in similar cases has taken place on the straight lines of philosophical continuity and sequence. In a word, the skepticism of the Italian Renaissance has either become merged and extinguished by ecclesiastical dogma, or else, taking another and opposite direction, it has committed intellectual suicide by sacrificing itself on the altar of intel lectual Nihilism and Negation. In France, on the contrary, as already pointed out, the philosophy of skepticism and free enquiry takes a much wider range of culture. Not however that this implies an inferiority in other departments of philosophical and scientific research, if at least we except the slight superiority in aesthetic and artistic productions which seems implied by the names ot Jean Cousin, Palissy, Vouet, Le Bruii and Poussiii. Were we to take a crucial instance of the comparative culture of the two countries and their parallelism in progressive know ledge, we might perhaps pair off the mathematical school of Ramus against that of Galileo and his disciples. During the seventeenth century, stimulated no doubt by the marvellous and then recent discoveries in astronomy, no study was more fashionable even in royal circles than that of mathematics. The chairs occupied by its professors were invested with greater splendour than other professorial chairs, ' d' autant,' as we are told, ' que les mathematiques soiit sciences royales et de tous temps estimecs tres belles et tres necessaires.' Though the difference might not have been great, the suc cessors in Ramus's mathematical chair, including such famous names as Henri de Monantheuil, Victe Jacques Martin, Jean Introduction, JJaptiste Morin, Gilles de Roberval, Jean Stilla, and Pierre G-assendi, weie superior to those who followed in the steps and propagated the teaching of Galileo Galilei. We must regard as part of this larger learning in mathematics and physical science, the greater amplitude and diversity of skeptical free-thought which we have already asserted to characterize French philosophy. The bearing of this point on the subject-matter of the present volume, is that which its readers ought especially to bear in mind. Thus in the plan of selection herein adopted, which was also the plan of the former volume, the thinkers chosen are t}rpes. They do not represent an unbroken continuity of thought, nor a close chronological sequence in point of time. Intellectual principles, standpoints or directions involving- unity or similarity such as might afford a basis for classifica- tioii. may exist in various kinds. These mere tendencies may stand in relation to the persons who embody and represent ! hem like a string on which is threaded a number of beads. The thread of silk, or cotton, or wire, bears no more vital or essential relation to the beads thereby held together than, let us say, the Lhmreaii principle of plant-classification by ex ternal structure bears to the vital attributes or true mttnml character of the plants t hits discriminated. Thus under the general principle of five scientific enquiry— a principle uncommitted to any particular method or conclu sion — we may have a skepticism wholly free from both affirmation or negation — in other words, pure Pyrrhonism : or we may have a skepticism which is adopted in order to obtain a ground or foothold for some dogmatic principle — the methodical principle which is known in philosophy as academic skepticism. We might, on sufficient grounds given, have adopted this discrimination in the former volume. Thus 110 attentive reader could have failed to note the essential difference between, let us say, Pulci, Machiavelli and Vanini on the one hand, and Dante, Petrarca and Bruno on the other. Introduction, xi Headers little versed in philosophical thought might have assigned to the former a kind of philosophical unscrupulous- ness, a liberty degenerating into libertinism ; in other words, they might have accused them of perversities of ratiocination which are impossible both in idea and actuality, forgetting that a principle of thought such as e.g. the pure enquiry for truth, especially for truth that is absolute, may easily exist without any definite conclusion or kind of method. A similar discrimination may obtain in the case of French skeptical thinkers, and a consideration of the names pertain ing to academic and Pyrrhonic skepticism will furnish a proof of the impartiality with which the names in the following volume have been selected. Happily for our purpose, the greater wealth of French philosophic thought in thinkers of both kinds will render the comparison between them more demonstrable as well as variedly interesting. We thus have a kind of dual continuity of French free philosophy. I. II. Pyrrhonic Skeptics. Academic Skeptics. Montaigne. Descartes. Rabelais. Peter Ramu*. Charron. Pascal. Sanchez. Malebranche. Pascal. Huet of Avranches. Le Vayer. Bayle. Rousseau. D'Alembert. Voltaire. It is not contended that these lists are faultless, or that a name assigned to one might have equal right to be assigned to the other. The qualities for which they stand are rather approximately than distinctly separable. They are in one case more or less Pyrrhonic, or more Pyrrhonic than academic, or again more academic than Pyrrhonic. Pascal, to take a remarkable example, occupies a place in each list. It would xii Introduction. certainly not be easy to say on a full and impartial examina tion of the question whether his was more a Pyrrhonic or an academic skepticism. There was a time in his life when he was entirely and exclusively the former, but there was another period when he was wholly the latter. Le Vayer, on the other hand, started with being an academic skeptic, but the close of his philosophical career presents him as wholly a Pyrrhoiiian. In short . the two methods of skeptical thought are so closely akin, the line which separates the academic from * he Pyrrhonic thinker is either so faint and imperceptible, or else is so wavy and uncertain, that it seems impossible to obtain a clear indication of its position. Readers of these lists will probably feel some surprise at what ma}* lie termed, especially by way of contrast with Italian philosophers, the greater affluence of French free thinkers. Almost every thinker of importance in French philosophy during the seventeenth century may claim to be more or less of a skeptic or free-thinker. There are of course reasons why the germ of free culture should have produced such a diversity of mature fruitage in French thought, why Montaigne, Charron and Rabelais stretch hands of brotherhood and philosophical reciprocity across the intervening centuries 10 the Encyclopaedists, to Rousseau, D'Alembert, Diderot and Voltaire in the eighteenth century, but these reasons we have, no room or time at present to explore. Some of them are political and economical, others are ecclesiastical and religious; all of them arc so indissolubly connected with the history of France that to attempt a bare enumeration of them would involve the writing of French history during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lastly. It is the author's pleasant duty again to proffer his thanks to Mr. "Win. Swan Sonnenschein for the continuation of those invaluable indices with which he most kindly enriched the earlier volume. Those who are acquainted with the ful ness, the learning, the literary and other interests, the varied Introduction. xiii utility of those judicious additamenta to that volume, will be the first to concede how much they deserve the acknowledg ment and gratitude both of author and reader. JOHN OWEN. EAST ANSTEY RECTORY, October 24M, 1893. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. MONTAIGNE . . 432 CHAPTER II. PETER RAMUS 493 CHAPTER III. CHARRON 559 CHAPTER IV. SANCHEZ 617 CHAPTER V. LA MOTHE-LE-VAYER 649 CHAPTER VI. PASCAL 731 INDEX TO LITERARY REFERENCES 809 INDEX TO SUBJECTS .... .823 THE SKEPTICS OF THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE. VOL. II. ' Hut if lie should still remain in douht. where is the harm, or rather wht/ in it not to he <;nt*idered a i/onl ? The sxhjert it rcitlrnfh/ one which admits stro>/;/ jimhrifiififtc.i on npimxite. stile.*. Donlt therefore, is the proper sentiment for the occasion."1 S. Bailey, Essay on Pursuit of Truth, p. 42. ' J'aj/pelle Monl(/it>»-lion/i<>. The only fault I find in him is tint with which he is usually charged, — ho parades t< n fully and freely what he conceives to be his own eccentricities, taking a half-humorous pleasure in making him self out more weak', capricious, ignorant, foolish and forgetful than he really wa>. Mi<> LEYCESTEK. Ma}' not this well-marked characteristic help to explain what we call his skepticism? He may have taken a pleasure in minimizing his knowledge and magnifying his ignorance for the same reason that he exaggerates his weaknesses and throws a veil over his virtues. I have some times thought this is a kind of trick of our skeptics, just as some valetudinarians take a morbid delight in dilating on their symptoms, or perhaps as beggars show their sores to elicit sympathy and charity. TIIKVOII. Rather say, Miss Leycester, for the reason that beggars are beggars — an overt proof that they possess nothing, and are not ashamed to own it. That a skeptic should claim the name and the intellectual indigence which it implies, and notwithstanding, make an open boast of his knowledge, would be an incongruity too flagrant and self-stultifying to be common. AnrxnEL. And yet an exaggerated estimate, combined with a needless parade, of one's own ignorance, may surely be just Montaigne. 425 as far from the truth as an unreal and ostentatious display of knowledge. The besetting sin of skepticism, I should say, is pretentious ignorance— a false and affected agnosticism. This is one reason which makes me distrust the sincerity of over-much skeptical profession. In this respect I agree with Miss Leycester ; as a rule ' Metlunks our skaptics do protest too much.' Were they more silent, I should give them more credence. HARRINGTON. You do Montaigne, at all events, injustice in this particular. His extreme garrulity is not the quality only of his belief or unbelief; it is part of the man himself — a characteristic of his effusive temperament. Reticence on any subject was not only distasteful, but utterly repellent to his nature. What we call his vanity or egotism — the weakness which I regard as peculiarly his ' besetting sin ' — seems fre quently but another name for this irrepressible talkativeness, this overflow of confidential communication. Hence, having exhausted all other subjects of which he feels and admits his ignorance, he turns with ever new delight to himself — the subject which, though abundantly mysterious, he knows best ; and like a child with a mechanical toy, he invites us again and again to behold that most wonderful of ingenious puzzles — his own inward being. He opens, so to speak, the outer case ; he exposes the curious machinery within. Piecemeal he detaches and removes every single wheel or joint or spring. He takes a childish delight in declaiming on the admirable beauty, fitness, and exquisite delicacy of adjustment of the Avhole mechanism. And when he has exhausted every single portion of it, with the deftness acquired by long practice, ho puts the whole machine in working order again, and asks, as he sets it going, with a mixture of triumph at his own skill and enjoyment of our surprise, if we ever or anywhere saw such a remarkable and curious piece of mechanical ingenuity as he has just displayed to us. Moreover, if we put ourselves back to the environment of Montaigne, we find another explanation of his somewhat peculiar attitude towards the theology of his time. It held high authority, and was avowedly, and very inconveniently adverse to the freedom of thought in 426 TJie Skeptics of the French Renaissance. which Montaigne excelled, and which he delighted in display ing in icritiny — that he was, except among- familiar associates, equally candid in xjx'cch, we have hardly sufficient evidence. Kven if we suj)j)ose that he had himself advanced so far in his skepticism, as to feel safe towards his Maker in thinking so freely, it is not likely that he felt anything like the same safety as legarded his neighbours, or the world at large. He may, there fore, have assumed, and I incline to think lie did, habitually, in that portion of his work to which attention is here directed, assume a manner obviously not inconsistent with, and fairly attributable to, a lack of earnextnexx. He probably never lost sight of the possible expediency of a retreat from a contest not unlikely in those days to end in martyrdom — which I am con vinced lie would never have courted, and would, had he been tried, ' most religiously ' have avoided. Miss LEYCKSTF.IJ. I must take exception to your ruling, Charles! No doubt Montaigne is garrulous. // r« xanx d/re, lnu to resolve his vanity, and still worse his skepticism, into mere uncontrollable loquacity is to confound the symptom with the disease, (nirrulity, when it takes such a form as Montaigne's, is surely the outward expression of a very intense feeling. TJIKVOI;. Still Harrington's argument is not so easily dis posed of. Random speaking or writing, and such, himself being witness, was Montaigne's, may, as we all know, easily incur tin1 suspicion of obnoxious opinions. Indeed so great is the discursiveness of method and multifariousness of material in the /VO.Y///.S-, that I would almost undertake, by a judicious selection and juxtaposition of extracts, to bring Montaigne in guilty of almost every opinion that has been seriously pro pounded since the commencement of human thought. But we had better, I think, postpone the consideration of Montaigne's character until we have before us the data which I have accumulated on the subject. Of course he is much more than the purveyor of easy good-humoured gossip ' about everything and a few things besides.' For as he is the especial repre sentative in France, as Pomponazzi in Italy, or Agrippa in Germany, of the new learning — the movement of free modern culture in opposition to mediaeval ecclesiasticism — Montaigne in fact, besides being the first of French skeptics, is the earliest Montaigne. 427 French philosopher. ' The Thales of France,' as Justus Lip- sius calls him, not so much because he can claim to be an original thinker, still less the exponent of a systematic scheme of thought or practice, as because being a Frenchman he first presented in the national form, with those characteristics of ' sweetness and light ' which mark the best philosophic thought of his countrymen, the speculations and opinions of the ancients, combined in his case into an exquisite ' pot-pourri ' with his own modern instincts and native homely common sense. MRS. ARUNDEL. But if Montaigne's opinions are so various as to be contradictory, why not give him the ' benefit of the doubt,' and proclaim him a sound philosopher and an orthodox Christian ? DR. TREVOR. Most willingly do I assign him the benefit of doubt, and that of the most pronounced character ; because I believe him to be, some few disguises notwithstanding, an arrant unbeliever. Besides which such mutual contradictions annihilate each other, as we have already seen in our chapter on Twofold Truth ; and, as you know, conflicting testimony by a witness does not receive the benefit of any one particular construction ; it is refused all credence whatsoever. Miss LEYCESTER. You recommended Mr. Arundel, if he wished to take up cudgels for Montaigne's orthodoxy, to read the Abbe Labourderie's work, Le Christianisme de Montaigne. I should like to ask him whether the perusal of that book has satisfied him of Montaigne's Christianity in any generally accepted sense of the term. ARUNDEL. I daresay Montaigne's Christianity will form part of Trevor's dissertation. I will not forestall what he has to tell us, further than to say that if Montaigne was a Christian in any but the most superficial sense of the word, the fact must be shown by some other method than that employed by the Abbe. Bayle St. John calls his attempt Jesiiitical, because it infers Montaigne's Christianity from some discon nected extracts of his translation of Raymund's Natural 'Ilieology. Certainly the ignoring of the direct evidence con tained in the Essays, and the appeal to a translation which he undertook in obedience to his father's injunctions, afford to my mind a conclusive proof of the weakness of his case. 428 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. Moreover, if the matter were so clear as the worthy Abbe pretends, he need not have wasted some six hundred pages on its elucidation and establishment. HARRINGTON. Just imagine what consternation a rigid application of the Abbe's method would create among our modern army of translators ! Miss LKYCESTER. No doubt the principle may be pushed to an undue extreme ; still, a translation voluntarily under taken does, mostly, imply sympathy to a very considerable extent. Besides, if the Abbe was quite mistaken in inferring Montaigne's sympathy with the orthodox parts of the Natural Theology, we should not be justified in inferring his skepticism from the freer portions of the same work. TREVOR. But with the Abbe it is a main argument ; with us it is altogether secondary. Montaigne's skepticism is quite demonstrable from his own admissions, and needs no corrobora- tion from any other source whatsoever. As to his Christianity, it is the crux of his commentators, and for a good reason — it constitutes the x or ' unknown quantity ' of his intellectual equation. I have solved the problem as well as I can ; but only with the result of discovering in his ' Christianity ' the strongest proof of his religious skepticism. From one point of view Le Christianisme de Montaigne may be regarded as a literary feat. I at least should have thought it impossible, before reading it, that so dull and leaden a book could have been written on so mercurial a theme. Miss LEYCESTER. There are certain persons whom M. Gus- tave Brunet calls ' Montaignologists,'1 who are trying to do the same service for the great Essayist which our Chaucer and Shakespeare societies are endeavouring to effect for those poets. Do you know whether their researches have thrown any new light on Montaigne's thought or character ? TREVOR. So far as I can determine, none worth mention — no more in fact than the labours of Shakespeare societies have effected in modifying, to any considerable extent, what has always been known of our great dramatist's genuine works. 1 ' Montaignologue.' M. SteBeuvehas entered a well-merited protest against the use of this word as peculiarly inappropriate to Montaigne. Causeries du Lundi, iv. p. 80. Montaigne. 429 For that kind of literary labour, pushed to the extreme which it often is now-a-days, I have but scant sympathy. To spend a lifetime in the accumulation of such dreary scraps of infor mation as might be furnished by a man's butcher's bills, or his signature to unimportant business documents, appears to me the greatest possible waste of time and energy. It is the mere scavengery of literature — a kind of Lazarus occupation, ' gathering the crumbs which fall from the rich man's table.' When I have myself sat at the table and enjoyed the dishes, the mice are welcome to the crumbs. ARUNDEL. I entirely differ from you, Doctor, and would reply to your quotation by another from the same source. I say of every ' rich man,' i.e. every famous man in art, science, or literature, ' Gather up the fragments that remain, that no thing be lost.' TREVOR. According to my experience, such ' gatherings ' mostly result in ' nothing being found.' HARRINGTON. Your skepticism, Doctor, appears to me perfectly misplaced. I agree with Arundel. Literary anti- quarianism is not only justifiable in idea, but has frequently achieved invaluable results which could never have been attained by any other process than the patient sifting of literary ' waste,' to which you have given the uncomplimen tary name of ' scavengery.' Take, e.g. Shakespeare. It is not as modifying his dramas that Shakespeare societies set themselves to investigate every discoverable record of his life, and to prosecute their search in the most unlikely places, but as throwing incidental light on his character and circum stances. Emerson, you remember, notes it as an observable fact that while he was writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rogers in the borough court of Stratford for 35s. lOd. for corn de livered to him at different times ; whence he not unfairly infers that he was a good husband, with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. Such casual and homely information was certainly well worth the pains taken to acquire it. Miss LEYCESTER. What you call literary antiquarianism is connected, I presume, with the universal curiosity respecting the personal habits of all great personages, from royalty down wards. In some respects the feeling may have a very adequate 430 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. basis ; for it springs, or may spring, from the conviction of the importance of personal habits or minor circumstances for de termining a man's character. In itself it is not a matter of profound concernment what time such a king used to rise in the morning, whether he took a cold bath, how mncli time he" allotted to his duties and how much to his pleasures, etc. ; but the answers to such questions help to determine his royal qualities; like secondary characteristics in plants or animals, they contribute to his classification as c.r). among ro/.v faineants or their opposites. To superficial people it might seem absurd that a man capable of writing Macbeth should have troubled himself about ;35x. KkL ; and that while inditing the witches' scene, or depicting Lady Macbeth's ' slumbery agitation,' he was inwardly debating 'how he might compasse that rogue Eogers, and procure paymente of his lawfulle debte ; ' but to those who study human character in detail, and are aware on what small issues its larger generalizations depend, will cherish all these small mementoes as invaluable indications of personal tendencies. MRS. HARRINGTON. That is to say, the ' crumbs from a rich man's table,' even when we have partaken of some of the dishes, may help to fill up our knowledge of the man's cookery and his general household economy. HARRINGTON. More than that, Maria. It may throw a fuller light on his true character than we could gain from his writ ings, even in the case of so communicative a writer as Mon taigne. When in the South of France the summer before last, I got at Bordeaux a work on Montaigne by a local anti quary1 (the same that I lent to you, Trevor), which gave some curious disclosures as to his family and ancestors. All his biographers agree that he was exceptionally vain of his sup posed descent from the old feudal possessors of the Seigneury of Montaigne, and most of them regarded Scaliger's assertion,2 that his father was a ' seller of herrings,' as an unworthy aspersion on the noble lineage of the great essayist ; though, 1 Michel de Montaigne son oriyine safamille, par Theophile Malvezin, Bordeaux 1875. 2 Scaliyerana Secunda, Art. ' Montaigne ' (p. 457). Montaigne. 43 1 as Dr. Payno remarked, sucli a circumstance, if true, was more to the honour of herring merchants than derogatory to himself. Now it seems that, spite of Montaigne's allusions to his long line of feudal ancestors, their warlike avocations, etc., and his remark, conceived in the essential spirit of feudalism, that ' the sword was the sole fitting employment of French nobles,' that his grandfather was a general mer chant of Bordeaux, who trafficked in wines, salt fish, and other commodities. It also appears that the chateau of Montaigne had only been in the possession of his family for one genera tion, his father being the only one of his ' ancestors ' born there; and that, instead of giving their family name to the Seigneury, they took the name Montaigne from it — their own family name being the bourgeois and common one of Eyquem. Now what a flood of light do these facts, only recently dis covered, throw upon Montaigne's barefaced assertion, that, ' most of his ancestors were born at the chateau of Montaigne, O 7 and bestowed upon it their affection and their name,' or when we discover in a record of Montaigne's family, published by Dr. Payen, a note of his own birth, with the pen drawn across the surname Eyquem. "What a curious comment is thereby afforded on the 4Gth Essay of his First Book, in which he inveighs bitterly against the custom of noble families assum ing the name of their seigneuries instead of the proper name of their families ! No doubt we knew, apart from these dis coveries, that Montaigne was vain; besides being also 'divers et ondoyant' ; we have his own candid admission of both of these weaknesses ; but I think we may plead that the excess as well of the vanity as of the waywardness, is demonstrated in a peculiarly vivid manner by these antiquarian researches. TREVOR. Perhaps in these cases I ought to admit the ser vices of antiquarianism, though it is easy here as elsewhere to exaggerate them. Shakespeare's being alive to the importance of securing payment for his corn, does not convey to me a single trait of character that I was previously ignorant of. Any diligent reader of his works must have concluded that, with all his imaginative fervour, he was quite a business man. As to Montaigne, he so repeatedly reproaches himself with vanity, folly, and even falsehood, that an additional corrobor- 43 2 TIic Skeptics of t/ic French Renaissance. ation of the truth of those charges does not seem to me to amount to much. Miss LEYCESTER. But this disclosure goes beyond that ; for it reveals, casually and incidentally, a fact respecting which Montaigne, with all his vaunting of selt'-anal3Tsis and his eulogiums on his introspective sincerity, is guilty, not only of a 'suppressio veri,' but of a ' suggestio falsi.' lie undoubtedly wished his contemporaries to believe — what most of his readers have believed to the present day — that he had a long feudal pedigree; whereas he was actually descended from a merchant.1 ARTXDKL. But I thought Montaigne had English blood in his veins. He certainly claims kindred with our race.a TREVOR. Merely so far that his surname of Eyquem which, notwithstanding Harrington and the antiquarians, he does not seem to me to evince any desire to suppress, was common to an English family. Some have converted it to Egham, others to Oakham. But the derivation of Eyquem is too uncertain to allow us to draw any inference from it. Could it have been proved the equivalent of Ockam, the coincidence would, for us, have been interesting. UAI;I;IXGTOX. Whatever the merits or demerits of Mon taigne, we must allow him one conspicuous attainment- — and that too of a skeptical kind — I mean Ataraxia. This quality is not only reflected in his Exxaijx, but is engendered by them. Indeed, I do not know any work so well adapted to create a placid, genial, many-sided equanimity as Montaigne's EHHCUJH. So far he is an illustration, second only to Sokrates, of the influence of Pyrrhonic suspense in generating philosophic calm. ARUXDEL. It seems to me, Harrington, that you are con founding two very different things, viz., the Ataraxia resulting from the perpetual equilibration of divergencies or antagonisms, whether in speculation or in practice, and mere constitutional indifference or insouciance. The latter, more than the former, was, in my opinion, the secret of Montaigne's apathy. He was 1 M. Malvezin op. cit. p. 89, etc. Payen, Xouv. Doc. p. 10 ; coinp. Bayle St. John, Montaiyne the Essayist, vol. i. p. 16. - See on this subject Bayle St. John's work, vol. i. p. 9. A recent German historian of Philosophy goes so far as to call Montaigne a ' sohn eines gebornen Euglilnders,' which he certainly was not. Erdmann, Grundriss, etc., i. 552. Montaigne. 433 one of Nature's stoics, blessed with a "hard heart and sound digestion." Genuine philosophic calm resembles, in my opinion, religious composure so far that it is the effect of effort, of watch fulness, of a certain amount of earnestness. Even the Pyrrho- nists themselves admit this. But Montaigne was incapable both of effort and earnestness. He would have been equally calm, in the sense of indifferent, had he never heard of Pyrrhon's philosophy. TREVOR. I agree with Harrington, in attributing Mon taigne's Ataraxia to his philosophy; and I think you are doing him great injustice. The constitutional insouciance you mention is a half-brutish stolidity which comes from want of thought. Now, whatever else Montaigne may have been or not been, he was indubitably a thinker, and that of a very profound and logical type. Nor was he by any means destitute of feeling. Indeed, he was endued with sensibility of a very high order. He tells us that he was so acutely sympathetic, that he could never hear any one cough without feeling a desire to imitate him. No doubt ho succeeded in maintaining a stoical com posure towards the ills and vicissitudes of life ; but tins wras attained in the way you commend, by self-discipline, by per sistent thought, and reflection, just as in point of fact, his skeptical Ataraxia was the fruit of his antithetical habit, and his endeavour to attain on all subjects a just mean, equally removed from every extravagance and extreme. I will now begin my paper : — Passing from tlie Renaissance In Italy, with its many-sided aspects, its wide-spread results, its sudden creation of a national literature and language, and its galaxy of illustrious names, to the chief repre- sentives of the same movement in France, we become conscious both of resemblances and contrasts. On the one hand some of the general causes we have considered, as contributing to the progress of Free- thought in Italy, co-operated also in the growth of Enlightenment in France. The chief coefficient in the former was also a primary agent in the latter, viz. the study of the classics. They agreed, moreover, in an antipathy to Scholasticism and dogma, and in a direct appeal to Nature and simplicity. Both adopted skepticism as a necessary mode of deliverance from intellectual thraldom. But what first strikes us as in instituting a comparison between them is, the preponderance of contrasts over similarities. Montaigne's Essais, the 434 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. lirst product of the French Renaissance, was published in 1580 ; and therefore more than a century after the appearance of the classics of the Italian Renaissance. Indeed the wave of the Italian Enlightenment had lost nearly the whole of its original impetus, and was reduced to a few insignificant eddies when, in reduced volume and energy it began to break on the coasts of France. But this disparity is not, what the general history and prospects of the Renaissance during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries would have led us to expect. At the com mencement of the thirteenth century the country which of all others possessed the fairest outlook, in respect of approaching enlightenment and Free-thought, was Southern France. It was one of the chief homes of the Troubadours. Placed midway between Spain and Italy, it received at the same time the declining rays of the now setting sun of Arab civilization and culture, anil the earlier beams of the rising sun of Italian Classicalism. The Troubadours were not onlv wandering minstrels, but they occupied to a considerable extent, just as the old Creek rhapsodists did. the position of general teachers and purvevors of Free-thought. They also cultivated, lirst in Europe, the graces of style and linguistic expression in a language other than the Latin of the Schoolmen and the Church : and this of itself constituted a breach, with the old instruments of dogma. Their daring spirit in the interpre tation of the same dogmas we have already alluded to. One of the results of their free-culture and humanistic spirit being the birth and development of certain heresies which were peculiarly obnoxious to Rome, not so much on account of their actual conclusions — some of which were sufficiently strange — as because they were permeated by the spirit of intellectual independence and anti-sacerdotalism. But this promise of an early spring-tide of Free-thought for Franco was nipped in the bud by the infamous crusade of Innocent III. The general bearing of that event, for Italian Free-thought, I have already glanced at, but it possesses also a distinctive meaning in the history of the French Renaissance. It serves to explain those peculiarities in the progress of the people and the language by which the history of France, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, is so markedly distinguished from that of Italy. It arrested completely those grow ing forces which would else have culminated in a Renaissance earlier even than that of Italy. It postponed for two centuries the growth of French Enlightenment. What, left to itself, the many-sided culture of Southern France might have attained, we have no means of knowing, any more than we can predict the definitive results of any other mis chievous interference with the advance of human culture and civiliza tion. It has been said that the Troubadours produced no distinguished name, or epoch-making work. They did not combine to create a "HYimer, Montaigne. 435 as did the Ionian rhapsodists of Greece, nor a Dante and Petrarcn, like the popular ministrelsy of South Italy. But such a reproach is both ungenerous and unjust. Their capacities and possibilities, con fessedly brilliant, were cruelly thwarted by Innocent's crusade. It is idle to speculate on the maturity of a life of which we only possess the data of a youth of extraordinary promise; but the forecast would be nothing less than anomalous that did not augur a ripe development just as brilliant and wonderful. But this violent suppression of the nascent Free-thought of South France had also the effect of destroying for many years her commercial energy. The close connexion of a varied commerce with free culture we have already noticed, both in the cases of ancient Greece and modern Italy. Before the thirteenth century the greatest commercial rival of Italy was Southern France. All its chief towns, Marseilles, Avignon, Aries, Narbonne, Toulouse, Bordeaux, were thriving centres of a commercial enterprise which extended its ramifications beyond Italy and Greece to Byzantium and the East ; while the trade and other relations between Southern France and the North of Spain were of so intimate a character that the two districts were often regarded and described as portions of one integral country.1 I need not point out the resemblance in these conditions, so favourable to Free-thought, between South-France and Italy. Indeed the Provencal poetry often manifests an intermixture of foreign ideas and expressions which proves that the exchange of commodities with foreign nations was not limited to their material products or manufactures.2 But as I have remarked, this commercial activity was almost totally extinguished by the Pope's crusade. In some of the provinces wasted by De Montfort and his lieutenants, there were hardly inhabitants enough left to carry on the most indispensable of all native industries— the cultivation of the soil.3 Orthodoxy had done its work, and for the time had achieved its aims. Heresy was extirpated according to the formula which the satirist applied to the Roman armies— 'They make a solitude and call it peace.' We must not however forget, in the similarity of predisposing conditions, that there were also divergencies, neither small nor unim portant, between the Italian and French Renaissance ; the result of which was to give Italy an undoubted superiority as a field of free- thought. Firstly : the political circumstances of Italy, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, were better adapted for the growth of intellectual freedom than those of France during the same period, as 1 Comp. Aubertin Hist de la lanyue et de la litterateur Francises au Moyen Age, vol. 1. p. 279. 2 M. Aubertin, op. cit. i. 280. 3 See on the whole subject, Martin, Hiatoire de France, vol. iv. chap, xxiii. 436 77ic Skeptics of the French Renaissance. being marked by a much greater share of political liberty. AVe haye already noticed the early rise of the Commons in Italy which took place before the twelfth century. Partly as a consequence of this, partly from other causes, the feudalism generated by chiyalry never succeeded in iinding a home in Italy except in the Norman kingdom of Naples. In France, on the other hand, feudalism took root and became a powerful factor in its political institutions from the time of the first crusade ; accordingly we find that the Commons of France did not succeed in gaining their independence till the latter end of the fifteenth century. This difference in political and social conditions implies necessarily a considerable distinction in respect of aptitude for mental freedom. In Italy the first-fruits of the national Enlighten ment at once took form in the national tongue and became the common property of all sections of the community. No caste or class distinction was recognized in respect of intellectual qualities or appreciation of literary merits, whereas the essence of feudalism, normally developed, is to create and intensify such distinctions. Chivalry had no doubt its sentimental and generous side, by means of which its protection was extended to the poor, oppressed, and the weak; but this protection generally implied patronage, and was by no means the perfect social equality that free-culture demands. Even the Troubadours in the height of their prosperity were divided into classes or orders,1 and the members of the highest order were occasionally scions of noble houses, so that a spice of feudalism was thus introduced even into 'the (iay Science.' Resides, in the political history of Franco the influences of feudalism received a peculiar intensification and corroboration by their gradual incorporation with the prerogatives of the Crown, instead of being, as in England and Italy, partly annihilated by alliance with the Commons. As a general result, Literature and Enlightenment attained much later in France that freedom and popu larity they acquired at their earliest development in Italy. To me the most pleasing and characteristic picture of the Italian Renaissance is the muleteers reciting portions of Dante or the sonnets of Petrarca, or artizans and rustics engaged in singing the songs of Tasso and Ariosto. No such popular interest in the highest products of the national literature meets us in France until the commencement of the sixteenth century, Montaigne's Essais being the first really popular work in French literature. For three centuries, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth, the most influential writers in France were foreign. Next to the Greek and Latin classics, men with a taste for culture read Dante, Petrarca, Tasso and Ariosto. A glance at the list of authors quoted by Montaigne reveals the singular poverty of 1 M. AuLortin, op. cit., p. 298. Montaigne. 437 French literature in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. While the Essais are studded with quotations from classical antiquity and with frequent callings from the Italian poets, the native writers of Prance thought worthy of mention might be counted on the fingers of one hand, Marot, Ronsard, Amyot and Du Bellay being the chief of them. Hence the Italian Enlightenment seems more indigenous and national than the later born Renaissance in France ; though, in com paring them, allowance should be always made for the deadly wound the Free-thought of France received from papal tyranny in the begin- ing of the thirteenth century. The distinction between the Renaissance in France and in Italy is further evidenced by the effect of each on its own language. The Italian tongue is the creation of the cultural awakening of the nation. Its growth and development are to a considerable extent coeval with the golden age of its literature. Within the compass of little more than a century the language was not only half-evolved, but definitively established by the works of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. There is little difference between the pure Tuscan of these writers and the literary Italian of the present day; whereas the French of the thirteenth century is almost another language com pared with that of its classical epoch — the tongue of Corneille, Moliere, and Racine. Even had it attained its maturity in the Essais of Montaigne, or the more polished writings of De Balzac — and there have been French authors of repute who have preferred the ' careless beauties' of Montaigne to the finished periods of the best French writers of the nineteenth century — still this would make the final evolution of the French language some two centuries later than that of the Italian. Of the causes which contributed to this difference I have already noted one — the sudden arresting of the growth of romance, poetry and language by the Languedoc crusade. To this might be added the disturbed political condition of France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But there remains another cause, both of the general distinction between the Italian and French Renaissance, and of the arrested development of the French language, which was one of its concomitants. I allude to the difference in the educational methods of the two countries. Emerging from the comparative darkness of the middle ages, Italy was the first European country to throw off the yoke of the Schoolmen, not only as a system of dogmas, but as a method of education. This it was enabled to accomplish, in part, by the greater freedom of her Uni versity foundations, which again was a consequence of her political divisions and rivalries. You remember how Petrarca satirizes the educational systems of his time for their adherence to Aristotle and VOL. n. c 43 S The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. dialectic. His invective is a clear indication of the attitude of the Italian Enlightenment to current methods of instruction. The polemic of himself, and fellow Free-thinkers, against the antiquated methods and subjects of teaching, was not lost. With the growth of the Renaissance, the diffusion of Greek and Latin literature and the rapid progress of a general spirit of inquiry, the Italian Universities began to abandon their Scholasticism; or at least the}- combined with the theological subjects insisted on by the Church, a continuously larger admixture of Philosophy, Natural Science, and Ih'llcx I^'ttrcs. They were able to accomplish this reformation by the free, and in many cases municipal, character of their governments. Our recent, discus sion OH Pompona/./i. and our forthcoming examination of Ramus, will enable you reali/e the extent of liberty a Professor at Padua enjoyed in the fifteenth century, and how much greater it was than that of a Regius Professor at Paris nearly a century later. The ready eagerness of Italian Universities to embrace all lilting subjects of instruction, even when quite novel and untried, is incidentally illus trated bv the establishment of a Dante chair at Florence hardly more than half a century after the poet's death, Some idea of the siii'iiilicancc of this step, as manifesting an appreciation of novel teaching, may be gained by asking the question: In how many English towns and seats of learning does a Shakespeare chair exist at the present day ? In France. OH the cither hand, the methods of Scholasticism continued to survive in her Universities until late in the sixteenth century (liV.'S). Not onlv so, but an antiquated uniformity was the charac teristic of all her seats of learning. The tendency to centralization, which was the natural effect of the consolidation of the monarchy, operated mischievously for its educational establishments. All the Universities in France conformed their instruction and methods to those of the University of Paris; and this, under the gradually in creasing ascendancy of the French monarchy, had lost its media'val reputation for Free-thought and Enlightenment. Clement Marot in the sixteenth century calls the Professors of Art under whom he had been educated, 'grands betes,' adding, 'jo veux perdre ma part de paradis, s'ils ue m'ont perdu ma jeunesse.' l The partial significance of Ramus's struggle with the ruling powers of the University, as we shall sec in our next discussion, was his attempt to impart more elas- ticity to its routine of instruction ; while his stress upon Rhetoric as the science of graceful and ornate expression, was in reality an effort to infuse into his pupils something of the humanizing influences of 1 Marot, (Euv., Scconde Epiatre du Coq a VAanc. Montaigne. 439 poetry and Belles Lettrcs which the Italian Universities had adopted long before. \V e are now in a position to estimate some of those differences that distinguish the early progress of the Renaissance in Italy and in France. "We see why, in the latter country, the movement betrays symptoms as of arrested vitality in a living organism ; we discern the reason why it presents, compared with Italy, a less spontaneous and indi genous character. We perceive also the justification of the common classification, which makes Montaigne the chief representative of the French Renaissance ; and as occupying, in the sixteenth, a position analogous to that which pertains to Petrarca and Boccaccio in the Italian Enlightenment of the fourteenth, century. In relation to our special subject, we first of all observe that Montaigne combines most curiousty, in his antecedents and circum stances, all the free-thinking influences that were energizing in the France of the sixteenth century, as well as the special advantages which South France enjoyed by its proximity to Spain and Italy. His father, Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne, was the son of a Bor deaux merchant (as Harrington just now informed us, and in passing, I willingly avow my obligations to the work which he mentions), who seems to have been the first of his ancestors born at the chateau of Montaigne.1 He was evidently a man of much original power, as well as of that mental independence which is allied with and often mistaken for eccentricity. Although occupying the position of a country gentleman, and dwelling mostly at his chateau in Perigord, ho took an active part in the religious and political questions of his t;me. On two occasions he accompanied Francis I. on his Italian campaigns; and I have no doubt brought home some tincture of that Free-thought and humanistic culture of which Italy was at that time the European purveyor. His labours as a Cou stiller of the Parlia ment of Bordeaux necessitated his acquaintance with the social and political questions stirring in his own country. That he was a man of some culture is shown by his interest in learned men, e.g. with Govea, who for twenty years was president of the College of Guienno at Bordeaux, and one of the first classical scholars in Europe. That his sympathies were to a certain extent liberal, seems evidenced by his enthusiastic approbation of Raymund of Sabieude's Natural Theology, and his exhortation to his son Michel to translate it from Latin to French; while his dissatisfaction with the educational methods of his time, and perhaps also some sympathy with the republican aspirations of which his son's friend, La Boetie, was the 1 M. Malvrzin, op. cit., p. 80, etc. Payen, Nouv. Doc., p. 10. Comp. Bayle St. John, Montaigne t/ie Esxayist, vol. i. p. 16, etc. 440 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. most recognised exponent during that century, might be inferred from the early training to which he subjected his son Michel. While, then, Montaigne, on his father's side, might claim some affinity with classicalism, as well as with the general culture which French seigneurs not unfrequently brought home from their Italian campaigns, he was connected on his mother's side with the Free- thought of the Spanish peninsula. His mother's name was Lopes, and antiquarian research seems to show that she was descended from a family of Spanish refugees. We know that at the end of the four teenth century there were large migrations from Spain and Portugal to Bordeaux and the south of France of Jews, Protestants and others, flying from the newly-established Inquisition. There seems indeed reason for believing that Montaigne's mother's family was of Jewish extraction ; and that its male members pursued the avocations — so common to Spanish Jews of that age — of merchants and doctors. That she had Protestant sympathies has not been proved ; but the fact that one of Montaigne's brothers and two of his sisters were Protes tants may afford some slight presumption that such was the case. Per haps, too, Montaigne's own friendly correspondence with Henry of Xavarre may be taken as evincing a leaning to a Protestantism some what less austere and bigoted than that of Calvin or the French Huguenots. At any rate he seems to have been connected, on his mother's side, with the Free-thought, and physical science research for which Spain had long been celebrated. Indeed, he himself dis tinctly admits that many of the peculiarities in his own character were due to his mother's influence. The child of such parents, Michel de Montaigne may be said to have inherited a character of sturdy independence which was likely to pursue its own intellectual course without much deference to the wishes or prejudices of those about him. He also derived from his parents and family traditions a predisposition to freedom of thought and an insuperable dislike to dogma or constraint of every kind. Michel was the eldest son of his parents, two children born before him having died before coming to manhood. He was born in the year 1513. Of his early training he has left a particular account. It was one of the circumstances of his life of which among others he felt that he had a right to be vain. His father was endowed with sufficient originality to evolve out of his own experience and reason a theory of education. Its chief characteristics were a belief in nature and freedom ; a persuasion that education implied evolution, a gradual unfolding from within instead of a forcible shaping from without. It was therefore to be free from constraint, harshness, or compulsion of any kind. The child was to be allured unconsciously Montaigne. 44 1 aiicl freely into the paths of learning. Montaigne's father was per suaded that no instrumentality was fitter for awakening the powers of a child's mind, and bringing it by degrees into contact with the greatest minds of antiquity, than the study of Latin ; accordingly he gave him from his earliest infancy in charge of a German tutor well skilled in Latin, but entirely ignorant of French. Latin was there- iore Montaigne's mother-tongue, and he could both speak and read it fluently before he had attained any knowledge of French. His father pursued the same method in what may be called the social develop ment of his son's character. Instead of bringing him up at his own chateau and surrounding him with the servants and usages pertaining to a feudal seigneury, he gave him in charge of the peasantry on his estate. A peasant woman was selected for his foster-mother, and peasants also for his god-parents. The principle on which his father based this novel method of training seems to reveal his popular sympathies. ' Let him look,' said he, ' rather to those who stretch out their arms towards him than to those whose backs are turned his way.' To such a superstitious extent did Montaigne senior pur sue his chosen method of educating his son's mind, ' in all freedom and joyousness without any severity or constraint,' that he caused him to be awakened in the mornings by the sound of some musical instrument. Montaigne himself, while evidently approving this free and delicate method of training, thought it ineffectual in his own case, owing to what he was pleased to denominate his sluggish tempera ment, which was so great that he could hardly be induced to join other children in play. It is certain that his early training tended to confirm that innate predisposition to a genial good-humoured electicism to which his Essais so abundantly testify. Between the surroundings of his childhood — his peasant foster-mother and play mates, the tutor who spoke to him only in Latin, the childish sports, like chess-playing, by which his father meant to teach him Greek — ami the careless, desultory, many-sided opinions which he collected and gave to the world in his old age, there is a clear self-evident congruity. I have already remarked that Montaigne's Free-thought, on his father's side, is connected with the Italian Renaissance. His father had certainly imbibed his theory of education from what he had seen and heard in Italy ; and Montaigne himself assures us that it was only on the removal of these Italian associations that his father con sented to forego this system of instruction and send him to school.1 1 Bayle St. John supposes that he may have derived it in part from a peru sal of Rabjlais' C/ironique G-arganfninej published the year before Michel's birth. Montaigne the Ewayiyt, i. p. 37. 442 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. We may take this as an incidental illustration of the differences then existing between the principles of education current in France and in Italy; and as some proof that the distinction in university teaching we have observed to exist between the t\vo countries extended also to their methods of elementary education. It also demonstrates the singular susceptibility to new ideas which seems to have marked the seigneur of Montaigne, and which he bequeathed in abundant measure to his more celebrated son. Accordingly, at the early age of six years Michel was sent to the College of Guienne in Bordeaux, where he had the advantage of the tuition of classical scholars whose re putations are even now European. He remained there until he was thirteen years old, and was supposed to have finished his education ; though in after life his own retrospect of his school life was by no means so warmly cherished as the preceding period of home-training. After quitting the College of Cmienne he entered on a course of legal studies, probably at Toulouse or at Paris. This was doubtless in tended as a necessary introduction to those magisterial duties to which his father destined him. For some years Montaigne was em ployed as a member of the Court of Aides in Perigord, and later as a Conscillcr of the Parliament of Bordeaux. The most memorable incident of this part of his life, in relation to his Free-thought, is his intimate friendship with La Boetie, only broken off by the death of the latter in 15G3. How far this close alliance implies a concurrence with La Boetie's free political aspirations is one of those obscure points in his life which none of Montaigne's biographers seem able to elucidate. Both Montaigne and his father were professedly loyal supporters of the monarchy ; and so far defenders of the ' Voluntary Servitude' against which La Boetie launched his satire. But we must place on the other side Montaigne's frequently expressed dis satisfaction with a court, together with its concomitants ; and the fact that La Boetie's free opinions in politics were precisely similar in principle to the liberty which Montaigne advocated in philosophy and religion. That his legal studies and magisterial functions were thoroughly distasteful to a man of Montaigne's temperament is self evident, without his own emphatic corroboration. He had no taste for jurisprudence, though, as he complained, his father ' plunged him into it even while a child, up to his very ears.' He 'found it compli cated in its forms, violent in its prescriptions, barbarous in its language — full of conti^adictions and obscurities.' He demanded why common language, ' so easy for every other use, becomes obscure and unintelligible in legal documents?' and he thinks that lawyers have purposely complicated those matters in order to render themselves and their functions the more necessary. He is both astonished and Montaigne. .s aggrieved that France, as he characteristically phrased it, ho;d more laws than all the rest of the world, and that those laws comprehended ' so many barbarities and atrocities.' His humane mind recoiled especially from the cruelty of legal punishments and the use of the torture. 'Whatsoever,' lie said, 'is beyond the simple punishment of death seems to me mere cruelty.' Cherishing these opinions, and withal endowed with powerful studious proclivities and an indomitable love of freedom, we are not surprised to find Montaigne taking the most important step of his life, i.e. retiring from all public functions, at the early age of thirty-seven years, and determining to spend the rest of his life in studious seclu sion. A conjecture has been made, which I regard as highly probable, that his motive for taking this step may have been in part political. Dissatisfied with the cruel, high-handed proceedings of Charles IX., he may have wished to resign functions which would have made him an accomplice in the acts of the government. From early manhood he had been an occasional attendant at the French court, though he entertained the most sovereign contempt for the mere profession of a courtier ; but from the accession of Charles IX. the government dis played such a combination of imbecility and cruelty that a thoughtful and humane man, as Montaigne was, might reasonably wish to hold aloof from it. That he did not lose the favour of his sovereign by his retirement from public vocations is shown by his being created, in 1571, ' chevalier of the order of St. Michael,' a distinction of which Montaigne was childishly vain. More important than this unphilo- sophical gewgaw was the literary distinction he acquired in 1509, as a translator of Raymund of Sabieude's Natural rriieoloSi) Montaigne was employed mostly in the composition of his immortal work. He recounts more than once the peculiar genius and mode of composition of his Essen a. Probably no work put together in such a dilettante hap- hazard fashion ever achieved a celebrity so immediate and so enduring. His taste for multifarious reading, which deserved the epithet ' omnivorous ' quite as much as Southey's, was one of the most confirmed of his idiosyncrasies ; but he suffered, or believed himself to suffer, from a defective memory. To remedy this, he adopted the plan of culling quotations, and writing down his obser vations on them, together with the thoughts that further meditation on them suggested. Having pursued this course for some years, he had accumulated in his common-place books a considerable quantity of material. When he finally determined to publish, he gathered his various disjointed observations, etc. together, and arranged them under different headings, with as close an approximation to order as they seemed to admit, and in this loose desultory manner he contrived to make an epoch-making work. But there is, we must admit, an unde niable affinity between Montaigne's literary method and his skeptic- Montaigne, 445 ism. Averse to any decisive opinion or continuous systematic thought, his leisurely ' dips ' into various authors, his desultory selections of striking passages, his occasional meditations, his discursive writing 'by fits and starts' as the humour seized him, harmonized well with an eclectic many-sidedness that took cognizance of all opinions, and with a restless vivacious skepticism that was satisfied with none. Soon after the publication of his Essais, Montaigne started on a tour through Germany, Switzerland and Italy. This journey he under took partly on account of his health, partly as a relaxation after his sedentary occupations at Montaigne. What might otherwise have been of no particular importance for our subject, is found to possess a special significance by our possessing a diary of it written partly by Montaigne himself. This work presents us with an invaluable sup plementary estimate of his character, his daily habits, his likes and dislikes, both personal and intellectual.1 It reveals, more uncon sciously than the Essaix, how deeply seated in his disposition were those peculiarities which in speculative matters took the form of skepticism. It paints in hues of extra vividness those strong con trasts of qualities which have been a puzzle to his biographers, and which will remain so as long as they forget the essential dualism or rather manifoldness of his character. We see represented the strange union of little-mindedness with magnanimity, egoism with unselfish ness, skepticism with superstition, easy morality with reverence for genuine Christianity, which distinguished him. As a revelation of personal qualities the diary stands almost on a higher level than the Essais ; while it certainly possesses the advantage of being an uninten tional disclosure. It portrays Montaigne in the easy chair and dress ing-gown of private life ; and is devoid of that suspicion of exaggerating personal eccentricities from which the Essais are not altogether free. Without the diary we should not, I think, have estimated so fully the value he placed on religious observances, e.g. attending mass, though manifestly less as a moans of spiritual benefit than as a social duty. Nor should we have realized so distinctly the half-sympathetic, half- contemptuous regard which he bestows on persons of all creeds who are religious over-much. We should not have known so much of his love for intellectual freedom and mutual tolerance, nor should we have learned so fully the sources of his indifference to most of the current forms of Christianity, Nothing, we find, better pleases him on his journey than discussing with Huguenot or Calvinist pastors some minutiae of their respective creeds; especially those which involved 1 Comp. Ste Beuve's Essay, ' Montaigne en Voyage,' Nouveaux Lundis, vol. ii. p. 156. 446 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. jatent self-contradictions, e.y. Belief in the bodily presence of Christ in the Sacrament. Nor is his criticism of what may be called the ' seamy side ' of religious and dogmatic convictions limited to dis sentients from his own creed. He is just as ready to note the irreverence of Pope and Cardinals at a solemnization of high mass as he is to mark the puzzlement of a Calvinist pastor in trying to reconcile incompatible beliefs. But of greater significance than any thing else, for our purpose, is the amusing indication of that trait in his disposition which is the ground-principle of his skepticism. He traverses the towns of Germany and Italy in just the same mood as he peruses the books in his library. He is as ' divers et ondoyant ' in a physical as in an intellectual itinerary. Novelty is the main goal of his effort ; perpetual movement from one fresh scene to the other, disliking to travel the same road twice, and so occupied with the changeful delights of his route as to hate the idea of arriving at his destination — precisely the same mood in fact that he evinced in his search for truth. His diary is also useful as telling us the recep tion his Esxciix met with in the somewhat lax court of Gregory XVI. The points the council of the Index thought right to animadvert upon are interesting both as. to what they record and what they omit. Montaigne was bidden to expurgate the following objectionable points, c (j. the use of the word Fortune, the quotation of heretical poets, the apology for Julian the apostate, the remark that persons while praying are exempt from vicious inclinations at the time, the opinion that all punishment beyond the infliction of simple death is cruelty, his judgment as to the undogmatic education of children, etc. We ma}7 observe that the Pyrrhonism of the book is not mentioned ; doubtless as being a method of philosophising too common in Rome, and within the Papal curia itself, to need either notice or reprobation. However, Montaigne, as a professedly true son of the church, was dealt with leniently on his explaining the points inculpated to the authorities; their correction was finally left to his own judgment, and it cannot be shown that he erased or modified a single one of the points suggested to him by his papal critics. While at Rome, his fellow-citizens at Bordeaux elected him to fill the office of mayor of that city. Montaigne at first declined the prof fered honour ; but, at the personal request of Henry III., at last ac cepted it. He returned to his chateau at the latter end of 1581, and commenced his municipal duties, withal warning the Bordelais that they were not to expect too much of him. The remaining portion of Montaigne's life we may pass over summarily. His government of Bordeaux is coeval with one of the most disastrous periods of French history. We may easily conceive, indeed we have his own attesta- Montaigne. 447 tiou of the fact, how the unhappy wars of religion tended to confirm his instinctive dislike for dogma. He himself seems to have steered cautiously through the perils of the time. He studied both his in terests and his philosophical instincts in declining an active co-opera tion either with the League or with the Huguenots. Both sides, indeed seem to have recognised his moderation and neutrality ; and were therefore careful not to insist on a partizanship entirely alien to his character. But towards the end of his life Montaigne discerned, in my opinion, the disastrous consequence for France of the success of the League; and this serves to explain in part his closer intercourse with Henry of Navarre. It \vas to the accession of this monarch that Montaigne looked for a cessation of those evils from which France was suffering; and Henry in his turn seems to have regarded the old philosopher with singular esteem and affection. The corre spondence between Montaigne and Henry has been published; and it is difficult to say on which of the two famous names it reflects the greatest lustre. Montaigne died in 1592, after having received the rites of the Church. The piety and submission of his dying hours have often been adduced as an undeniable proof of his catholic ortho doxy, and as if it were a protest against the free opinions of his Essais. To me it seems, as I shall presently point out, qxiite in har mony with Montaigne's disposition, with the ordinary tenor of his life, and with his Pyrrhonic, or rather suspensive, skepticism. Turn we now to the Essais : — France in the sixteenth century like Italy in the fourteenth and Ger many in the fifteenth, was undergoing those convulsive throes which in the political and religious, as in the animal world, are the indis pensable conditions of new life. The age of Montaigne was an age of transition, and transition implies and necessitates suspense. Older beliefs were disappearing or becoming modified, newer convictions were beginning to struggle to life. It was the winter of barrenness intervening between autumn and spring. From this point of view Montaigne's Essais is an epoch-making work ; not only for the history of French skepticism, but for that of modern literature and civilisation, forming as they do an admirable reflex of the thought, movement and aspiration which were anima ting men's minds at the Renaissance. Moreover they enable us to estimate, approximately, the amount of culture and learning which were beginning to diffuse themselves over Southern Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century. Montaigne, as we have seen, was not a mere studious recluse. For a considerable part of his life he was a lawyer, a magistrate, a soldier, and a courtier ; indeed, for the whole of it he was occasionally engaged in public duties of some kind 448 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. or other.1 There seems, therefore, no reason to suppose that, beyond his own literary tastes, there was anything peculiar in the extent of his reading. How great this was, a superficial glance over his pages will serve to prove. Indeed, his own thoughts, notwithstanding their vigour and originality, are of ten in danger of being buried under the mass of classical lore adduced for their suggestion or illustration. This peculiarity is animadverted upon by almost every critic of Montaigne. But we must bear in mind the position which the then new learning occupied in France. It was nearly the same as it had been in Italy during the preceding., century. Beginning to emerge from the gloom of mediaeval superstition", we cannot be surprised if men's eyes were a little dazzled with the new light which was burst ing upon them from Greece and Rome. In the first delirium of dis covering the diamond mine of ancient learning, it is hardly wonderful that discrimination and judgment were often at fault, that every new stone was proclaimed to be of the first water and of inestimable value. What would be regarded as pedantry in our days was, in Montaigne's time, original research. And we may readily suppose that the samples of ancient wisdom which he and others delighted to incorporate in their pages operated on the inquiring minds of his time like the specimens of gold which the early Spanish navigators exposed to the wondering gaze of their countrymen, as proofs of the existence of an El Dorado in the New World — infusing into them an earnest desire to explore the sources of such wealth for themselves. But the Easais of Montaigne not only reflect the age in which they were written : they also reflect, still more pointedly, if possible, the mind of the author. Considered from the latter point of view, the work must, in my opinion, be pronounced unique. In no literature, ancient or modern, that I am aware of, have we such a perfect ex ample of keen and minute self-analysis. All the changes and incon sistencies which make up such a large portion of every human character, are so clearly depicted and vividly coloured in his descrip tion of himself, that they seem almost a caricature. The first glance at the picture reveals such a number of strange, multifarious charac teristics of every imaginable kind and every conceivable degree of strength and weakness, consistency and inconsistency, that to attempt to evolve from the wondrous whole anything approaching a firm, co herent, individual likeness seems utterly impossible. Here we find in close juxtaposition dogmatism and skepticism, superstitious belief and unreasoning unbelief. Here we have abject self-detraction by 1 This aspect of Montaigne's life is exhaustively treated in M. Griin's La Vie Publique de Montaigne, 1855. Comp. on the same subject Ste Beuve's paper ' Montaigne Maire de Bordeaux,' Noveaux Lundis, vi. p. 239. Montaigne. 449 •as the side of inordinate vanity, maxims of sublime wisdom followed by utterances of stupendous folly, philosophic truths intermingled with childish errors, deep religious feeling alternating with flagrant immorality ; in short, an inexhaustible storehouse of the greatest excellencies and most deplorable defects of our common nature. It is not one individual man that is portrayed, it is a kind of colossal collective humanity.1 ' A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome.' Our business, then, is to fix as far as possible this human kaleido scope. Out of his self-contradictions we must evolve something like coherency ; out of his versatile moods we must extract the more per manent characteristics ; from the grimaces and distortions of the mask we must infer what genuine human features lurk beneath. But the task is not without difficulty. Not merely is it that out of t innumerable views and opinions piled together at random, like the wares in a curiosity shop, we have to select those that occur oftenest, or which are put forward with most emphasis. But there is a further difficulty, when this is done. Who is to assure us that our conclusion is true, or that it is one which the subject of them would approve? For Montaigne has a cynical and avowed disdain for such a commonplace merit as consistency. He is confessedly the sport and j plaything of every chance thought, or passing emotion. He deli berately advances an argument for the pleasure, on another occasion, of refuting it ; and, lest his reader should be perplexed and provoked at such a wanton display of unphilosophical frivolity, he coolly avows his predilection for desultory methods of thought, arising out of accidental and haphazard occasions ; and plainly informs us that we are to take his utterances as the mere expression of his mood and thought at the precise moment when they were uttered.2 Amid this heterogeneous mass of incongruities, and in spite of his \ 1 This characteristic of his Essays was not hidden from Montaigne. Of. book ii. chap. 2, Hazlitt's Trans, p. 371, ' Authors have hitherto communicated themselves to the people by some particular and foreign mark, I the first of any, by my universal being? So Ste Beuve calls Montaigne ' Get honime de cabinet qui avait en lui 1'etoife de plusieurs hommes,' — Nouveaux Lundis, vol. ii. p. 177. Compare the same author's imaginary funeral of Montaigne, Port Royal, ii. p. 451. 2 'Car aussi ce sont icy mes humeurs et opinions; ie les donne pour ce qui est en ma creance, non pour ce qui est a croire : ie ne vioe icy qu'a descouvrir moy mesme, qui seray par adventure aultre demain, si nouvel apprentissage me change.' — Essais, Liv. i. chap, xxv. Edition Didot, p. 62. Comp. Hazlitt, Trans, p. 60. 45° 77/6' Skeptics of the French Renaissance. cynical disregard for ordinary modes of systematic exposition, a close examination enables us, I think, to discern something like a method and a purpose. The method, direct, earnest, and determined, is skepticism: the purpose is toleration — incidental, hesitating, hardly consciously avowed. That Montaigne was a skeptic would at first sight seem a super- , fluous assertion. There is hardly a page of his Essays which does not' hear emphatic evidence to the fact : indeed, the work has been for some centuries the national armoury of the most skeptical nation in modern Europe; although the weapons contained in it were all forged and tested in the skeptical schools of ancient (ireecc. Hence we find that repeatedly, though in his characteristic, slip-shod, incidental manner, Montaigne urges the weakness of the reason, the fallacious ness of the senses, the untrustworthiness of experience, the un certainty of opinion; or else truth is affirmed to be impossible, and doubt proclaimed as the highest wisdom, or some other customary argument or affirmation which our researches have shown to be more or less common to all skeptics. If a collection were made, and put in something like order, of all the unbelieving suspensive utterances contained in his Essays, a complete exposition of skepticism might easily be obtained ; but a connected dissertation on such a dangerous topic was utterly alien both to Montaigne's desultory methods of thinking and writing, and to his habitual caution, and fear of com promising himself with higher powers. Hence, if we set aside the well-known 1'Jth chapter of the '2nd book, containing his Apology for Raymund of Sabieude, in which we have a fairly continuous exposition of Pyrrhonism ; and possibly the 10th chapter of the 3rd book, in which, under the suggestive heading ' Of cripples,' ho enters a pro test against modern miracles, — his appreciation of skepticism, and his profound dislike of and contempt for dogmatism, is conveyed by casual incidental hints, and in a desultory; nay, often in an utterly irrelevant manner. But, apart from these open admissions and numerous scattered hints, ample evidence of the real bent of Mon taigne's thought is furnished by the general tone and drift of his writings— what might be called the 'circumstantial evidence' of his skepticism. For myself,! confess that I regard this kind of proof in the case not only of skepticism, but of every unpopular and con traband mode of thought, with even more favour than occasional and isolated admissions ; for it denotes not a momentary mood, such as might be caused by a mere ebullition of feeling, but the general and uniform temper of mind of the writer. It is the unconscious witness, and on this account all the more valuable, of the habitual state and direction of his intellect. Montaigne. 45 1 I propose to arrange what I have to say as to the nature and extent of Montaigne's skepticism under a fe\v simple heads — taking first the indirect arguments bearing on the point; and secondly, examining what I cannot but regard as direct and positive admissions of the fact, i.e. as positive as any admission of such a fact could be expected of Montaigne. His treatment of the senses, and the character of their deliverances, will soon enable us to appreciate the nature of our task. In one place he informs us ' with a distinctness,' as a recent critic remarks,1 ' which leaves nothing to be desired, that it is most absurd to deny the plain evidence of the senses, e.g. that fire does not burn or the sun does not give light ; there is no belief or knowledge in man which can be compared to their plain verdict in respect of certitude.'2 He tells us further 'that all knowledge is conveyed to us by the senses ; they are our masters, science begins by them, and is resolved into them.'3 No doubt, taken by itself, this language is sufficiently explicit ; but a very slight acquaintance with Montaigne's method, as well as the experience we have attained of the class of minds to which his own belongs, is enough to warn, us that such general admissions may easily be neutralized and rendered ineffec tive by an analysis which denies in parts what has been conceded as a whole. Sextos Empeirikos, as we have seen, insists on the trustworthiness of phenomena, as such; but this does not prevent his proof that taken simply the senses are liable to perpetual mistakes and perversions, and are therefore by no means infallible. Similarly Montaigne qualifies his general admission of the certainty of our sense-knowledge by a careful scrutiny into the many sources of their erroneous conclusions. He finds, e.g. in the senses, ' the greatest foundation and proof of our ignorance.'4 He dwells on the possibility, in the case of other beings, of senses varying in kind as well as degree from those possessed by man. He quotes the familiar instances of the mistakes of the senses with which Greek skepticism abounds, e.g. the false impression conveyed by a simultaneous pressure with the tips of two fingers on a musket-ball. He points out how the senses are continually imposed upon by imperfections inherent in the physical structure of their organs, or else in their modus opcrandi. He shows that they are perverted by the emotions and passions of the soul, on which they themselves exercise on tho other hand a prejudicial and deceptive influence. No doubt some 1 Hermann Thimme, Der Skept icismus Monta'ujne's, Gottingen 1875. 2 Bk. ii. ch. xii. Hazlitt's Trans., p. 275. 3 Bk. ii. ch. xii. Ibid., \>. 275. 4 Bli. ii. ch. xii. Ibid., p. 274. 452 77te Skeptics of the French Renaissance. kind of reliance on the senses is imperative. A man 'cannot avoid owning that the senses are the sovereign lords of his knowledge ; but they are \mcertain and falsifiable in all circumstances : 'tis there he is to light it out to the last, and if his just forces fail him, an they do. to supply that defect, with obstinacy, temerity and impu dence. In case what the Epicureans say be true "that we have no knowledge if the senses' appearances be false''; and if that also be true which the Stoics say, that "the appearances of the senses are so false that they can furnish us with no manner of knowledge," we shall conclude to the disadvantage of these two great dog matical sects (and surely of all others\ that there is no knowledge at all.'1 Whereupon follows an elaborate exposition of the error and uncertainty of the senses, preceded by the statement that every man may furnish himself with as many examples as he pleases, sn ordinary are the faults and tricks they put upon us;2 and closing with a verdict equally conclusive and important for Montaigne's skeptical position in this particular: ' We cannot know what things truly are, in themselves, seeing that nothing comes to us but what is falsitied and altered by the senses. Where the compass, the square and the rule are crooked, all propositions drawn thence, and all buildings erected by these guides, must of necessity be defective: the uncertainty of our senses rendering everything uncertain that they produce.' 3 Language of a stronger character it would bo impossible to imagine; and however much some writers, as c.(j. Herr Thimme, may endeavour to lessen its eifect by pronouncing much of it extremely ironical (' stark ironisch '), no candid reader, even after making the greatest possible allowance for Montaigne's love of paradox, and his cynical humour, can resist the conclusion that his distrust of the senses and the information conveyed by them is as complete as the same belief or unbelief of the extremest skeptic, whether ancient or modern. Equally explicit is Montaigne in his contemptuous estimate of the reason, to which the appeal on behalf of the truth next lies. ' Seeing the senses cannot determine our disputes, being lull of 1 Hcrr Thimme, whose theory of Montaigne's skepticism is that it is a simulated Pyrrhonism, adopted as a weapon against dogmatism, not against knowledge (though he nowhere touches on the relation of dogmatism to knowledge, nor considers the question how far an attack on the former necessarily includes the latter), remarks on this important passage ' Da haheii wir einen solchen " tour tVescrime " den Montaigne nur gegen die dogmatiselie Wissenschaft, keineswegs gegen das Wissen iiberhaupt fiilirt.'— Der Kkepti- cimnus Montaigne's, p. 14. 2 Book ii. chap. xii. Hazlitt. p. 277. 3 Book ii. chap. xii. Hid., p. 281. Montaigne. 453 mcertainty tl)emsehrcs, it must then be reason that must do it ; but no reason can be erected upon any other foundation than that of another reason ; and so we run back to all infinity.' l To the subject of this short argument Montaigne recurs again and again. The Impotence of the Reason is in fact a primary and incontrovertible axiom in his philosophy. We find it stated in every conceivable variety of form and manner, context and connexion ; and enforced and adorned with a lavish wealth of illustration. Especially does he seek to prove his point not only by adducing the manifold and inconsistent opinions of philosophers, but by an introspective analysis, at once keen and humorous, of the caprice, waywardness, and instability he finds within himself. Heroin Montaigne has added a new method to those of preceding writers (with the single exception perhaps of Rabelais) ; or rather to the objective arguments gathered from the history of human thought, he adds the personal subjective criterion so congenial to himself. This masterly piece of self-analysis Montaigne commences with the ironical confession: 'I that watch myself as narrowly as I can, and that have my eyes continually bent upon myself, like one that has no great business to do elsewhere, dare hardly tell the vanity and weakness I find in myself.'3 "Whereupon he treats us to along and amusing account of the caprice and vacillation which he calls his vanity.3 Nor is this, as is too commonly supposed, the mere outcome of a morbid egoism which leads him to magnify every infirmity belonging to himself. For my part I think this quality has been assigned io wrong motives by his critics. It is not because they are Montaigne's own idiosyncrasies that these traits are remarkable; but that being his own he has a greater power of apprehending them than he could possibly have in the case of any one else. Their importance lies in the fact that they constitute a subjective corroboration of a large number of objective phenomena. AVo shall have to touch upon this argument again when we come to speak of his confession of ignor ance among the positive proofs of his skepticism. But although Montaigne repeatedly denounces Reason, he would hardly be consistent it' he were devoid of inconsistency on this r,s on other subjects. Hence we find occasional passiges in which a 1 Book ii. chap. xii. Ha/.litt, p. 281. 2 Cf. Bk. ii. ch. xii. Hazlitt, p. 2(>3: cf. Book ii. ch. i. Didot, p. 1G9. ' Xous sommes tous de loppins et d'une contexture si in forme et diverse que clmsque piece, clmsque moment faict son jeu ; et se trcnve autiuit de difference de nous a nous monies que de nous a aultruy,' words which lose their Montaigiiesque flavour in a translation. 3 Book ii. chap. i. Hazlitt, p. 154. VOL. II. D 454 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. higher estimate of the reason is forced upon him. He tolls ITS, e.g. that ' every human presupposition and declaration has as much authority one as another, if reason do not make the difference.' 1 Moreover when lie subordinates the human reason to the Divine, or human truth to religious verity, as he does in more than one passage of the 7vw<7/x, he docs >ot scruple to add that we can only estimate or attain the Divine through and by means of the human.2 The following passage bearing on this point is too characteristic, to be omitted. 'If it (Divine knowledge) enter not into us by an extraordinary infusion, if it enters not only by reason but moreover by human ways (i.e. probably by the senses), it is not in us in its true dignity and splendour, atxf i/ct lam afraid we only have it Inj M/.s tray.'* An interesting example by the way of the conflict of theological with rationalistic modes of thought of which we have repeated instances in the Kxwtix. To the credit side of his estimate of reason from the theological or orthodox point of vie\v, must also be added certain ostensible and apparently sincere attempts to make, his depreciation of reason subserve the cause of religious dogma. This is the well known argument of 'methodised skepticism' which Descartes applied to philosophy, and Augustine, I [net. and so many other ecclesiastical skeptics to theology. In the rapid development, of skepticism which marked the Renaissance, such an argument occupied necessarily a prominent place. We have already had occasion to touch upon it incidentally; but must reserve for the present a full discussion of its merits and bearings. Although not unduly obtruded on our notice by Montaigne, it is evident that he laid considerable stress upon it. The argument was eminently suited to his position and temperament; because it enabled him to combine a specious profession of adherence to the Church, with a private licence of speculation which was practically unlimited. In this as in all his reasonings, Montaigne is utterly regardless of caution in his procedure, or moderation in his statements. He is, as he himself admits, the mere passive instrument of the dominating thought of the moment, whether its tendency be religious or profane, superstitious or skeptical.1 1 Book. ii. chap. xii. Hazlitt, p. 251. 2 The same argument is distinctly and repeatedly laid down by Baymund of Sabieude ; see Jlfaiitiyx irit/t the Skeptics, vol. ii. pp. 432-466. 3 Bk. ii. ch. xii. Hazlitt. p. 201: with which compare another striking passage, Bk. ii. ch. xii. Hazlitt. p. 2GB: 'The things that come to us from heaven have the sole right and authority of persuasion, the sole mark of truth : which also ice do not ace icith our own eyes, nor receive It/ our own means. * ' For my part,' says he. ' I must own that the puff of every accident not Montaigne. 455 Hence his language on human frailty ; the necessity of faith as a substitute for knowledge, the doctrine that truth and wisdom belong only to God ; that principles (of demonstrated knowledge) must be Divine and intuitive ; is so vigorous, and so highly flavoured with (apparently) genuine fervour and devotional unction, that it might easily have emanated from a disciple of Calvin, or St. Augustine.1 But after making all due abatements both for his exaltation of it in the interests of philosophy, and for his depreciation of it in the interests of theology, Montaigne's general treatment of human reason must be pronounced cynical and contemptuous in the extreme. He exhausts himself in ' base comparisons ' to denote its unprincipled duplicity, and consequent worthlessness as an arbiter of truth. He calls it a two-edged sword dangerous to handle by the unskilful, and as ready to wound the wielder as the adversary against whom it is unsheathed. It is like the shoe of Theramen3s, which will fit any foot:2 or it is compared to a pot with two handles, which may be lifted with either, or it is like lead or wax prepared to receive any impression. Instead of being, what it professes to be, the guide and ruler of humanity, it is most frequently its veriest slave; the ready and unscrupulous agent of its superstitious beliefs, its absurd customs, and its most foolish and nefarious actions. In short, human reason and judgment is with Montaigne a self- convicted mass of inconsistencies. It is at once the source of truth and the cause of error. It both elevates and degrades our human nature. By its means men are raised to the loftiest pinnacle of wisdom, or are sunk into the lowest depths of infamy. Those only are to be esteemed wise who turn a cautious and skeptical ear to its double-tongued admonitions; and the brutes are in this respect more fortunate than men, because they lack its uncertain and questionable guidance.3 only carries me along with it, according to its own inclination ; but th it moreover I worry and trouble nryself by the instability of my own posture. ' — Kazlitt, p. 154. 1 Cf Book ii. cb. xii. (Hazlitt, p. 204 ; also pp. 257-8.) It will be observed that the greater part of this 'clandestine dogmatism' as Sainte Beuve calls it, is found in the famous 'Apology chapter,' which we shall find furnishes the most convincing proof of Montaignu's skepticism. 2 Erasmus in his Adayia has commented on this proverb. Its origin is in Plutarch's Life of Nicias, who says that Theramenes was nick-named ' Cothurnus ' from his trimming propensities. 3 Dom Devienne in his Elorjc Historique well remarks on this characteristic, ' Quoique Montaigne fasse si peu de cas de la liaison, celle qu'il avoit recue de la Nature n'en etoit pas moins d'une trempe sup.-rieure, et on auroit pu dire d'elle ce qu'on a dit de 1'imagination de Malebranche, qu'elle obligeoit uu ins;rat.'— P. 101. 456 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. Our Essayist was not at all likely to pass over in silence iho vener able testimony on behalf of skepticism afforded by the conflicting beliefs ami usages of different portions of the human race, from philo sophers downwards, or as Montaigne would surest, upicarrt*. In dependently of tin1 confirmation of his own position derivable, from such a mass of historical evidence, the argument must have had more, than usual interest for a thinker who, like Montaigne, was so keenly alive to the charms of variety for its own sake, and who regarded, as we shall sec further on, such a divergency in the spiritual world as the due and proper analogue to tin- interminable diversity revealed by the physical world, lie repeatedly urges, therefore, the diversity of opinions, usages, etc., in all departments of human faith and practice. The familiar instances, adduced by Creek skeptics, of divergent and conflicting beliefs among different sects and communities, are again brought forward by Montaigne. The endless diversity in manners and customs in different countries, are d \velt upon with renewed emphasis, and with the advantage (by no means ignored by succeeding skeptics) of the additional illustration afforded by the recent discovery of a new world. The whole, sum of human thoughts and habits is reduced to custom:1 from whose tyrannical and universal dominion no condition of human existence is exempt. Hoth in religion and in morals \ve see the same diversity founded on the same la\v of custom. Hiilo-ophers and theologians <•.<]. have exhausted every imaginable hypothesis in their numberless attempts to define the Deity; and so givnt is the power of imagination pertaining to every man, that the ideas of God will probably vary in exact proportion to the number of minds who attempt to conceive and define it. Christianity, moreover, is a 'mere geographical expression/ and ' we arc Christians for the same reasons that we are Germans or Perigordians.2 Ethical maxims have similarly a purely local origin and value; so that which is good or seemly among ourselves is esteemed evil or indecorous among others. Montaigne, as we have said, loves this infinite, diversity in the phenomena of human life.:! Not only is it the reflex of nature, but also of the perpetual shiftings and changes he discerns within himself. A dead level of uniformity in the history of the human mind, supposing it possible, would have been insufferably tedious to one whose own mind was for ever undergoing some new modification, some abrupt and unexpected transformation or transition. lie would have felt as much out of sympathy with his species and historical surroundings as the restless ocean wave might be supposed to feel when wasting its strength on an unwearable cliff. To a nature such 1 Cf. Book i. chap. xxii. 2 Book ii. chap. xii. Hnzlitt, p. 203. 3 Cf. Letter to Madame de Duras, book ii. cli. xxxvii. Hazlitt, p. 3G3. Montaigne. 457 as Montaigne's, impressionable, mobile, inconstant, — diversity, whence- soever obtained, was the natiaral and only proper aliment. With a mixture of naivete and cynicism peculiar to himself, he assiires us that he always agreed for the time being with the author he was reacting, no matter what his opinions were, and though he was pei'fcctly aware that the different ideas he thus tried to assimilate, conflicted as much as possible with each other.1 With such an outspoken contempt for the faculty, it is only reason able to expect a corresponding distrust of its instrument or mode of expression. Accordingly, Montaigne has several incidental remarks on the nature and properties of words, and their contribution to the sum total of incertitude in which all things human are enveloped. He is, of course, a Nominalist. Words are to him as to all other skeptics. the mere arbitrary marks or signs of things. 'The name, 'he says, ' is a voice which denotes and signifies the thing ; the name is no part of the thing, or of the substance ; 'tis a foreign piece joined to the thing and outside of it.' 2 Still, his remarks on the subject are for the most part fragmentar^. I have often, wondered that among his Essays there is not one especially devoted to words, apart i.e. from proper names, and the methods of rhetoric.3 I should have thought it precisely the kind of subject to have attracted his notice, and for which his mode of treatment was pre-eminently well qualified. How he might have revelled in th^inanifold uncertainties of his theme. What humorous satire might have been expended on the invincible tendency of mankind to accept words instead of things. What in vective might have been poured on the hollow pretentiousness of mere verbosity. What examrjfflfc^cnty cruel wars caused by words,4 of great churches severed b^.a few syllables, of martyrdom inflicted on account of the difference between two letters, while each step of the argu- 'ment might have been illustrated by abundance of instances drawn from ancient and modern history. A delightful sample of the method he would have employed in handling this subject he gives us in chap. 13 of Book iii., when, apropos of Luther and the fact that he had stirred up more doubts than he had allayed, he says, ' Our con testation is verbal. I demand what nature is ; what pleasure, circle, and substitution (i.e. the well-known terms of Luther's technical 1 Book ii. cliap. xii. Hazlitt Trans., p. 2GG. 2 Hazlitt Trans., p. 288-9. 3 These ho ridicules in the 46th and 51st chapter of his first book. 4 Words as causes of legal disputes Montaigne does mention : ' Most of the occasions of disturbance in the world are grammatical ones ; our suits only spring from disputes as to the interpretation of la\vs; and most wars proceed from the inability of ministers clearly to express the conventions and treaties of amity of princes.' — Hazlitt Trans., p. 244. 45 8 TJic Skeptics of the French Renaissance tho< 1> gy) arc? The question is about words, and is answered accord ingly. A stone is a body, but if a man should, further urge "and what is a body ?— substance ; '' — "and what is substance? " and so on, he would drive the respondent to the end of his common-place book. We exchange one word for another, and very often for one less under stood. I know better what man is than I know what animal is, or mortal, or rational. To satisfy OIK; doubt, they give mo throe : 'tis the hydra's head. Sokratcs asked Menon what virtue was ? " There is, says Menon, ': the virtue of a man and of a woman, of a magistrate and of a private person, of an old man, and of a child. ' " "Very well, ' says Sokrates, " we were in quest of one virtue and thou hast brought us a whole swarm " ; we put one question and they return us a whole hive.' ' Such seem to me the more prominent among the indirect evidences of Montaigne's skepticism. If none other existed, we should have no difficulty in pronouncing a definitive verdict on the matter, especi ally with the light thrown on his procedure, by what wo have seen of the similar methods of other skeptics. \\\\\ there is, besides, an over whelming amount of evidence of a direct and positive kind, concern ing which the main ditliculty is to determine how much of it is meant for jest, how much for earnest. Not that Montaigne ever avowed in so many words his skepticism. Nowhere does he say, 'lam a professed skeptic,' still less 'lam a disbeliever.' Anything like a distinct declaration of a conviction, even of a negative kind, involved far too great an effort for the easy cynical indifference which he cultivated. While he had learnt too well the proper role of a skeptic to commit himself to express nega tion, ho knew that a definite denial was just as dogmatic, just, as open to the charge of presumption or omniscience, as a positive affirm ation. Indeed, of the two, he distrusted the negative more than its opposite. In either case, he disliked the coarse robustness of thought and action which is the accompaniment of intense and overmastering conviction. His experience of himself showed him the easy condi tions on which a placid semi-affirmative might be maintained ; and the civil wars of his day demonstrated, as it seemed to him, the excesses which follow in the train of purely negative principles, whether in politics or religion. Hence, Luther, with his crude unqualified denial of some dogmas, and his obtrusive positiveness with respect to others, was immeasurably more repugnant to Montaigne's temperament than the easy elastic faith of the cultured and refined Romanist. Erasmus, and not the monk of Wittenberg, would have been his ideal 1 Book iii. chap. xiii. Hazlitt Trans., p. 495. Montaigne. 459 Reformation leader, i.e. supposing him to have admitted the need of Reformation. Montaigne's position was therefore the genuinely skeptical one of , suspense. He took as his motto, not the absolute assertion of negative skepticism, ' knowledge is impossible,' but the interrogative one of ' Qua scais jc ? ' 1 This, moreover, is not only his own motto, engraved on his seal, etc., it is inscribed in a variety of forms and characters on the roof-timber of his library. We find it in the forefront of his Essays, as the human excellence which of all others is most commend able. It is evidently the cherished persuasion of his innermost being, the only avowed conviction with which he can safely be credited. The reticence he observed, in the face both of belief and disbelief, he here changes for open-mouthed and fervent professioa. It is the single article of his only creed, the standard by which he estimates both his own wisdom and that of his fellow men. ' The confession of ignorance,' says he, 'is one of the fairest and surest testimonies of judgment that I know.'2 And though he considers it possible to discriminate between the ignorance which precedes and that which follows knowledge, yet the latter is so vitiated by the suspicious source whence it emanates, that he prefers to take refuge as far as possible in the former ; which he calls the ' natural station whence I so vainly attempted to advance.' 3 I have already glanced at the religious aspect which Montaigne endeavours to give to this open profession of Nescience, and which assimilates it to the self-renuncia tion of Greek skepticism. The subject is one on which he frequently expatiates. Man's first sin, he tells us, was curiosity. This is the fatal fruit of the tree of knowledge, the accursed heritage which Adam bequeathed to his posterity; thence came pride, presumption, dogmatism, irreligion ; thence the unhallowed claim of a wisdom and knowledge which truly belong only to God. On the other hand the virtues of ignorance and simplicity are pre-eminently of a religious character. AVhere conscious ignorance exists we may be sure of finding humility, meekness, docility and submission. It is thus the climax not only of worldly, but also of Divine and heavenly wisdom. Montaigne therefore demands, in the interests both of philosophy and religion a frank and unqualified avowal of Xescience. Most of the abuses of the world have arisen from the preposterous fear which 1 It is an interesting example of Montaigne's indifference, and the cynical contemptuous manner in which he announces his most cherished opinions, that this preference of the question rather than the negation, is made immediately after subjecting it, when considered as the final refuge of Pyrrhonism, to ridi cule. Cf. Hazlitt Trans., p. 244. 2 Hazlitt Trans., p. 187. 3 Hazlitt Trans., p. 145. 460 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. besets mankind of making this avowal.1 It is one at all events from which Montaigne was singularly exempt. His dread of presumptuous science, and his appreciation of cautious Nescience, was a feeling which, as Bayle St. John properly notes, increased towards the end of his life; being more distinctly marked in his later than in his earlier Essays. One of his latest utterances on the subject is not devoid of genuine plaintiveness, though the Montaignesque humour is by no means lacking. 'Oh, what a soft and delicious pillow and how healthy, are ignorance and incuriosity for the repose of a well- formed head.'' But if Montaigne is so satisfied with the wisdom and piety of his conviction of Nescience, he is just as explicit as to the issues of that consciousness. Sokrates himself cannot exceed the earnestness with which he disclaims any intention of teaching. As he knows nothing himself he is totally unable to instruct others. Were- we to ask him, why then indite your Essays? Why cull your choice morsels of heathen wisdom from ancient Greece and Home? His answer would be, ' I write merely to give, by way of occupation and amusement, utterance to my thoughts, expression to my changeful, vacillating opinions. I have no desire to teach others. I have neither tho authority nor wish to be believed, being too conscious of my own ignorance to feel justified in attempting tho instruction of other men.' It is a singular instance of what may bo termed the irony of literature, that tho two thinkers who, in ancient Greece and modern France, were foremost in maintaining their Nescience and disavowing any power or intention of instructing their ago and nation, have actually been their most influential and permanent teachers. I do not wish to insist on what seems to me an undoubted probability, that the influence of Sokrates and Montaigne was in direct ratio of their skepticism; but I think I may fairly argue that the intellectual and moral qualities found in alliance with skeptical suspense, the incen tive to thought and self-examination that is furnished by a propaganda of Nescience — tho many-sided eclecticism that is the natural outcome of opposition to particular dogma, had, in both cases, a fructifying result not easy to overstate. In connection with Montaigne's repeated admissions of ignorance, must be placed his no less frequent confessions of fickleness and incertitude. He strongly objected, he tells us, to form an opinion, knowing what a grave responsibility he thereby incurred, and how 1 ILizlitt Trans., p. 477. ' Dogmatising,1 says Joseph Glanvil, ' is the great disturber both of ourselves and the world without us: for while we wed an opinion, we resolutely engage against every one that opposeth it.'— Kce^nia iScientifica, p. 168. Montaigne. 461 numorous were the chances of his being wrong. This caution, how ever exaggerated, is only what might have been expected of a pro fessed skeptic. What follows appears, at first sight, stranger; for he goes on to assure us that he was just as loth to change an opinion, but the reason assigned for this unexpected manifestation of dogma tism is eminently skeptical; because, as he cynically remarks, his motives for a change of any particular view might be just as un satisfactory as those that had originally counselled its adoption. So that even the small and fluctuating amount of stable opinion of which he sometimes admits the possession, qualified, as it no doubt was, with conditions and reservations of all kinds, was founded on the skeptical basis of the equal precariousness of all opinions. The picture suggested to my mind by this interesting specimen of self- diagnosis is this: Montaigne is like a man who has lost his way in the twilight, amid a wild and dangerous region. He has arrived at his present point by tracks and bye-paths, of which he is uncertain whether they are actual roads or not. Precipices, bogs, traps and pitfalls appear to surround him on all sides. Not a star can he find in the clouded sky to guide him ; or what appears the momentary gleam of some remembered constellation, he suspects may be an ocular delusion, or some unreal phantasm. True, there are human lights in the distance, but so many that ho knows not which to choose; either or all may be, for aught he knows, mere igncs fatni. What is the benighted wanderer to do? To go forward, even if he knew whither, were madness ; to go backward were just as rash. To many men such a situation would induce despair. Montaigne however is not easily driven to desperation. Like a genuine Epicunean philosopher, he makes the best of his position. He will quietly remain where he is. Whereupon he replenishes the little lump which has guided him in the twilight, He finds out the most sheltered spot in his immediate vicinity, opens his wallet of pro visions, amuses himself with watching the dark clouds above, the dim and wavering lights beneath, speculates as to what those lights mean, whether they are more to bo trusted than his own lantern. Presently ho goes to sleep with a drowsy uncertain hope that there may arrive a morning-dawn, and a sunrise, which will clear up his path ; if so, well ; if not, he can but remain where he is. The picture is perhaps not inviting. I do not conceive it is true of but an inlinitesimally small percentage of humanity; but among that per centage we must, I think, give Montaigne a place. It ought not to appear strange to find side by side with his admis sions of uncertainty, a frequent and distinct avowal of credulity. I need not point out how the two are psychologically related. 462 T/ic Skeptics of the French Renaissance. Suspense being a perfectly poised balance, a pinch of dust is enough to determine a preponderance of inclination to citlicr side. Hence, as we shall iind, the undue exclusivcncss of skepticism is often balanced, mercifully shall I say ? by as undue a receptivity. Both being pro duced by the self-same cause, i.e. indifference, or a certain easy flexibility of conviction capable, under different circumstances, of different and opposite effects. Montaigne admits, more than once, that lie receives without question every authority, whether good or bad; and this for the cynical reason that if they are found good, they are so much to his own credit, if bad, so much to their own discredit. The fault is not his but theirs.1 Certainly the unscrupulous manner in which he heaps up doubtful authorities, unhistorical instances, etc., one on the other, seems to require either justification or apology, though whether this, the only one Montaigne deigns to offer, be sufficient, is perhaps questionable. He is however equally credulous and uncertain in what emanates from himself; so that if on the one hand he is ready in his reading to accept his author's arguments, no matter how- great the inconsistency thereby involved, ho does not in his writings stipulate for more than just such an easy evanescent belief iii his own reasoning; which he therefore guarantees no further, than as expressions of the particular moods in which they were indited. How much of this kind of language is real, how much of it humorous, ironical, or affected, I do not profess to decide. That uncertainty, as the result of a general condition of unstable convic tion, was a prominent element in his mental character is sufficiently obvious. It is marked on every page of his writings and needs no corroboration from his own overt testimony. His main peculiarity, and that which imparts the greatest charm to his writings, is his clear apprehension of facts which mostly lie hidden in the deeper recesses of the human consciousness, and his ingenuous candour in bringing them to the surface, and exhibiting them to public gaze in all their nakedness and deformity. I have already admitted that in this respect, Montaigne is frequently guilty of exaggeration; but I am anxious that such exaggeration should not itself be exaggerated. Besides which, an attentive reader of Montaigne soon acquires the power of discriminating approximately between his genuine senti ments and the humour or cynicism which is merely their form or colouring for the time being. AVe recognise e.g. the humour of his statement that he had recourse to the public confessions of his Essays from a regard to the usage of Protestants, who objected to 1 Cf. Hazlitt, trans, p. 39. ' The tales I borrow I charge upon the consciences of those from whom I have them.' Montaigne. 463 private (auricular) confessions;1 and the cynicism of the avowal that in any matter of dispute he was equally ready to take either side. ' I should easily, in case of need, light up one candle to St. Michael and another to his dragon, as the old woman did.' 3 (2) But a still stronger admission of skepticism is to be found in Montaigne's famous apology for Raymund of Sabieude. This is in fact that portion of his work which has supplied the historians of philosophy with what they have regarded as a conclusive proof of his skepticism. Herr Thimme, in his monograph, seems inclined to blame the almost exclusive stress on this chapter, which has become customary ; and doubts how far it will bear out the verdict of complete Pyrrhonism which is inferred from it.3 In my opinion his blame and his doubt are equally unsustainable. It wrould be just as reasonable to find fault with a judge who, in directing a jury, should point out the strongest evidence in the case; and indicate what, if they believed the witness, their finding must necessarily be. The 'Apology Chapter ' is, as every reader of Montaigne knows, the Essay of the whole collection. Not only is it by far the longest and most carefully elaborated, not only is it marked with a gravity and set purpose quite foreign to the writer's usual manner, but it is of especial importance as containing an unusual proportion of personal confessions, indica tions of opinion, etc., so that his Apology for Raymund may be taken as his own ' Apologia ' as well. Indeed the very occasion of the Essay, and its object of defending his translation of Raymund's work, especially considering the character of that work, are of themselves a sufficient justification of the stress which has been laid upon it. l It is useless to enquire what effect Montaigne's translation of Sabieude may have had on the development of his own views. Bayle St. John believes it to have been considerable.5 AVhat is more certain is that it not only suggested to Montaigne the elaborate account which he gives of Pyrrhonism, but elicited an expressed preference for the 1 Cf. Hazlitt, trans, p. 173, also more explicitly p. 391, 'To meet the Hugue nots, who condemn our auricular and private confession, I confess n^self in public religiously and purely.' 2 Book iii. chap. i. Hazlitt, p. 365. The anecdote is told in Henry Stephens, Apoloyie pour Herodote, vol. ii. p. 325 (Liseux's edition). 3 Der Kkepticismus Montaigne's, p. 17. 4 Cf. e.y. Bouillier, Histoire de la Pliilosophie Cartesienne, i. p. 20: ' C'est dans 1'Apologie de Hemond de Sebonde qu'est, pour ainsi dire, ramasse le scepti- cisme tout entier de Montaigne. La il reproduit toutes les objections des sceptiques avec une verve, avec une malice, et une perndie incomparables ; la sous pretexte de defendre la raison et la foi, il ose tout dire contre la raison, il ose tout insinuer contre la foi.' 5 Bayle St. John's Montaiyne the Essayist, ii. p. 95. 77/6' Skeptics of the French Renaissance. wholesale doubt of that philosophy, rather than for the partial scepti cism of other schools, c.xc dix'it of revelation, but considers it unproved, and unproveable by the reason. 'Let us,' says he, 'ingenuously confess that (iod alone has dictated it to us, and faith; for 'tis no lesson of Nature and our own reason.'4 He continues in a strain in which a superficial reader may be unable to decide whether genuine faith, or philosophic irony is the more predominant: 'whoever shall consider man impartially 466 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. and without flattery, will see in him no efficacy or faculty that relishes of anything hut death and eart/i. The more we give, f111'^ confess to owe, and render, to God, we do it with the greater Christi anity,' which is surely nothing else but an expansion of Tertnllian's )r well known Crc, ijttid fihxiirduin. The sentiment may be admissi ble in the mouth of a devotee. As an utterance of Montaigne's, it needs no qnalilication. His treatment of miracles is a still more notable example of his skeptical equipoise. His ordinary point of view did not permit an explicit denial of them; even had his character and the circumstances of the case appeared to justify such a denial. Moreover, he himself confesses, as we have seen, to a keen and not over fastidious appetite for the sensational and marvellous. Hence, neither his philosophic principles nor his inclinations were in favour of rejecting miracles on mere a priori grounds. He speaks, in one place, with contempt of the presumption and rashness of discrediting all such marvels in a lump for the reason that we are unable to comprehend them.1 But for his own developed views on the subject, we must refer to the llth chapter of the I-} rd .Book. In this remarkable chapter he complains of the compulsion to which his intellect was sometimes subjected by a popular demand of belief in uncertain marvels. In such cases, says our essayist 'I find that almost throughout wo should say '• There is no such thing;" and should myself often make use of this answer; but I dare not, for they cry, "It is a defect produced from ignorance and weakness of understanding; " and I am forced for the most part to juggle for company and prate of frivolous and idle subjects, which I don't believe a single word of.' Then, after instanc ing some modern miracles, and pointing out their abnormal develop ment from trifling causes, and their enhancement by distance of time and space, he proceeds, ' To this very hour, all these miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me. I have never seen a greater miracle or monster in the world than myself.' In another sentence the germ of Hume's argument is apparent. ' How much more natural and likely do I find it, that two men should lie, than that one man in twelve hours ' time should fly with the wind from east to west;' and sums up his observations on this subject in the following words: 'Methinks a man is pardonable in disbelieving a miracle, as much at least as he can div^H and elude the verification of it by ways other than marvellous; and I am of St. Augustine's opinion, that tis better to lean towards doubt than assurance in things hard to prove and dangerous to believe.' ~ 1 Hazlitt, Trans, p. 77. 2 Hazlitt, Trans, p. 498. Montaigne. 467 Having now touched upon both the implicit and the more explicit evidences of Montaigne's skepticism, I will note briefly what seem to me the motive principles, which influenced and directed his tenden cies in this respect. When I said at the beginning of my paper that the unavowed object of Montaigne's Essays is toleration, I meant that this is the logical and only practical outcome of his reasonings. Grant him the premisses which he assumes, and fixity or uniformity of belief is utterly chimerical. It is in complete antagonism to all the laws and forces of Nature. Montaigne was therefore above everything else a lover of freedom. Not that he was prepared to dare or sacrifice any thing in her behalf: of that kind of affection either for persons or things he was constitutionally incapable. The liberty he loved, that which he sincerely wished all men to enjoy, was liberty of thought, and within certain limits, of its expression in word and act. Not withstanding his friendship for La Boe'tie he suppressed for a time the Essay of that ardent young republican on Voluntary Servitude, and misrepresented its purport. Montaigne had in truth no wish, even if he had the power, to overturn existing authorities in Church and State. He would rather go occasionally to court and play the courtier, or pay a visit to Rome and kiss the Pope's toe. The utmost he would have clone would have been to limit the power of Pope and King to persecute their subjects for trifling eccentricities of belief. Not that he loved either Huguenots or Lutherans. They were poor ignorant wretches, full of convictions and certainties of the most vigorous and overmastering kind, for which they were not only willing but eao-er to sacrifice life. It was hardly to be expected that a fastidious Epicursean like Montaigne could have any kindly feeling for such a combination of ignorance and dogmatism. He would have no con cession made to their absurd crotchets in respect of truth.1 Still he was in favour of liberty of conscience; and thought they had better be left alone. Writers on Montaigne have pointed out that what seems his skepticism, is in some cases but the effect of his love of liberty, and his impetuous disregard of all restraints. To some extent this is true: Montaigne is not unlike a full-blooded courser, to whom the mere sight of a barrier awakens an irrepressible desire to surmount it. Hence his liberty both of thought and action sometimes degener ates into licence. Nor is he unconscious of this infirmity, although ho does not think it needs an apology. Thus he tells us, apropos of liberty of speech, that he takes the liberty to say all that he dares to 1 Book i. chap. xxvi. with which compare Bx>k ii. chap. xix. 'on Liberty of Conscience.' 468 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. do; and wo might rejoin, if we accept bis own account of himself, that ho took the still greater liberty to do all that he dared to say. His primary rule of conduct was Nature, her laws, dictates and requirements: and Nature herself was, as he said, unbounded. Hence for more social regulations, restraints born of custom and the usages of civilization, he affected a supreme disdain. In a sentence, which marks the genuine skeptical enquirer, almost more than any other in the Jvwf/.s1, he says 'I so love freedom of will and action, that were I interdicted the remotest corners of the Indies, I should live a little more uneasy thereat : ' words which when duly applied give the key note both to his mental and moral character. He would oven make such an unlimited freedom a primary consideration in education. In his celebrated chapter on this topic, Book i. '25, he says, 'Let the tutor make his pupil examine and thoroughly sift every thing he reads. Nothing must come into his head on the mere basis of authority. The principles of Aristotle are none to him, any more than those of the Stoics and Epicureans. . . . Let the diversity of opinions be pro pounded to and laid before him, he will himself choose, if he be able ; if not, let him remain in doubt.1 The. non men die saver, dubbiar m' a^rata.' 2 For not less than knowledge, doubt to me is grateful. Ritter and other historians have made Montaigne's views of Nature the ground-principle of his philosophy. To a considerable extent this is correct. There is no doubt that he was thoroughly permeated by the new Nature-worship, which entered so largely and with such overpowering influence into the advanced culture of the period. Not that he ever shared the sublime intoxication of such men as Giordano Drano, Vaiiini and Campanella. His regard for Nature was not 1 Ilazlitt. Trans. ]>. 02. 2 Dante. Infn-uo. Canto xi. !K5. The same preference for healthy and natural skepticism to unwholesome, artificial or false knowledge, is expressed by Erasmus and Lord Bacon. Montaigne, it will be observed, agrees with Thel- wall, who in discussing the question of education with Coleridge, thought that the native soil should not be prejudiced in favour of roses and strawberries. Coleridge, Table Talk, p. 105. But unfortunately for Coleridge's rejoinder, 'native soils' are more often prejudiced by ill applied culture in favour of the thorns and thistles of dogma than in that of the ' roses and strawberries' of truth and liberty. Montaigne's views of education seem to have been de rived, in the first instance from his father's Italian method and his own early training; though he may have been indebted for a confirmation of them to Rabelais. Comp. Dr. F. A. Arnstadt, Francois Rabelais und scin Traite d~ Education : Leipzig, 1872, especially chap. x. p. 168. Rabelais and Montaigne \\vrj followed in their advocacy of uncramming, practical, character-develop ing education, by Charron, Locke and Rousseau. See Dr. Arnstadt, loc. cit. Montaigne. 469 like theirs, that oi a mistress to be passionately loved, the conse crated object of devotion and worship, sometimes of rather a rhapso dical and incoherent kind, but that of a queen, to be distantly respected, and intelligently served. Her law is supreme in all matters, whether of speculation or of practice. Conformity with her dictates is the sole requirement which can be demanded of humanity, which therefore makes obedience to lesser authorities of inferior obligation. As is usual with most of his views, he pushes his idea of nature-supremacy to excess ; especially when he employs it as a vantage-ground whence he can attack the dogmatism and presump tion of mankind, or ridicule the vices and follies of civilization. Not only does he pronounce the barbarous yet simple and manly state of the South American savages superior to the polished but effete civilization of his own time, but even their most offensive practices, cannibalism, e.g., appeared less worthy of repugnance than the racks and torments, the worrying with wild beasts, which Montaigne him self had witnessed, not only, as he says, ' amongst inveterate and mortal enemies, but amongst neighbours and fellow-citizens, and what is worse, under colour of piety and religion.' 1 Moreover, he questions the superiority of man over the lower animals ; professing to find in the latter, not only in germ, but in a certain amount of development, most human excellencies, mental as well as physical. Even those emotions which seem peculiarly Iruman are, in his opinion, probably shared by the brute creation. An elephant, e.g. has evinced religious emotion, dogs have shown fidelity, lions have manifested gratitude, etc., etc. Although the authority on which these marvels are based is not high, it is interesting to find Montaigne and other skeptics anticipating speculations with which the physical science of our own day has made us familiar. Before I close my paper, I must say a word on Montaigne's religion. Like his views on other subjects, it may fairly be de scribed as ' an unknown quantity.' His constitutional temperament made him averse to novelties,2 especially of a vigorous and trenchant character, either in religion or politics ; and the events of his time and country were hardly calculated to lessen that aversion. His motto would probably have been ' Quieta non movere.' The dislike he occasionally manifests to the sectaries, is in my opinion, easily accounted for. As a rule they were further removed from that standard of tolerant indifference which Montaigne regarded as best 1 Hazlitt, Trans, p. 91. 2 See his letter to his wife, Hazlitt, p. 640. ' And in truth, novelty has cost so dear to this poor State (arid yet I know not whether it may not still cost more), that in all cases and places, I wash my hands of it.' VOL. II. E 470 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. in all dubious matters. Hence he would have felt much more at home in the society of scholarly and semi-skeptical cardinals than in that of Huguenot or Lutheran ministers. What he would have said to a freer sect which would have combined simplicity of belief and worship with genuine scholarship and scientific research, we have no means of knowing. That his instinctive love of liberty must have received a shock from the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, I cannot doubt. But we must remember that the religious intolerance of the ruling powers may have been made to wear the semblance of stern political necessity,1 while that so frequently evinced by the Huguenots was merely the expression of fervid religious conviction— a very different matter in Montaigne's estimation. For myself I have little doubt that Montaigne evinced, towards the end of his life, an increasing appreciation of the simplicity and nu- dogmatic character of the Christianity actually founded by Christ, though with his usual dualism he contrived to combine this feeling with a sentimental regard for the imposing ecclesiasticism which had been its actual embodiment for so many centuries. Thus he not only prefers the Lord's Prayer above all other forms of devotion,2 but thinks that to many men it might suffice; at least he confesses that he uses no other. He is also convinced that the very essence of Christianity is in its ethical purity; and therefore that its best dogmas consist of good actions and a holy life.3 This was, as we shall find, that particular phase of Montaigne's teaching that was taken np and elaborated by his disciple Charron ; and the intercourse of these thinkers during the last three years of Montaigne's life (1589-1592) was well-nigh continuous and unbroken. Like Charron, too, he expresses an unbounded contempt for the theory that orthodox belief is superior to virtuous practice, as a qualification for attaining the rewards of a future life. He relates the story of Diogenes, who, when pressed by a priest to accept his religion on condition of the reward of eternal felicity, indignantly answered, 'What! thou wouldest have me believe that Agesilaus and Epaminondas, who were so great men, shall be miserable, and that thou who art but a calf, and canst do nothing to purpose, shalt be happy because thou art a priest?' In the same direction points his commendation of the 1 Gabriel Naude, a free-thinker like Montaigne (resembling him also in other respects), expressly defended the massacre of St. Bartholomew as a iwlitical necessity. See his Considerations Politiques sur les Coups d'Etat, Rome, 1639, chap. iii. The circumstance is chiefly remarkable as proving how little the principles of freedom and toleration were then understood even by their professed defenders. * Book i. chap. Ivi. 8 Book ii. xii. Comp. Hazlitt, p. 201. Montaigne. 471 Emperor Julian ; for he by no means allows that his great moral and intellectual qualities are rendered nugatory by his renunciation of that form of Christianity presented for his acceptance. I am aware that this admiration for morality, and his assertion of it as the main point of religion, assumes a curious appearance when contrasted with Montaigne's confessedly lax life ; but we must bear in mind that, in an intellect so completely dualistic, the region of speculation and sentimental approval might be widely demarcated from that of positive practice. Besides, Montaigne was so completely the creature of occasional impulse, that no mere ' lex vivendi ' would suffice to turn him ' from the career of his humour.' What indeed could have been expected of a man who thus describes what he is pleased, I suppose ironically, to call his 'virtue.' 'My virtue is a virtue, or rather an innocence, casual and accidental. If I had been born of a more irregular complexion (i.e. with more vicious tendencies), I am afraid I should have made sorry work of it ; for I never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions were they never so little vehement.' i Montaigne, it is clear, was well qualified to become an inmate of Rabelais' Abbey of Thelemites. Little worthy excuse, however, can be preferred for Montaigne's ethical weakness. He was endowed with so much perspicacity, that no man saw more readily or fully the outcome whether of any given speculation or practice. He also possessed sufficient self-assertion as to be indepen dent of his environment. The only institution capable to a certain extent of influencing him was the Church; but from this source Montaigne found no encouragement to harmonize his life with his religious convictions. On the other hand, the dualism he fouud in himself he discovered to exist in the Church. Even if the C.mrch had not suggested and created it, it derived from its sanction and example a distinct and infallible authority. He frequently remarks on the hollo waiess of the religious profession of his time, especially among ecclesiastics. He notices e.g. the prevalent opinion that the profession of religion by men of part-; was only pretended. When at Rome, too, he observes that the Pop >. and cardinals are chatting pleasantly with each other during the eel Ora tion of High Mass, and remarks that the rites were more magniiicent than devotional. He is also careful to note how gross immorality was occasionally allied, among the Italian peasantry, with the most fervent devotion. He does not apparently think these inconsistencies worthy of reprehension ; though in his Essais he more than once discusses hypocrisy in the tone of the austerest of moralists. They are merely interesting eccentricities, to be noted in his diary, as any 1 Bk. ii. chap. ii. Hazlitt, p. 195. 47- The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. other peculiarity or noteworthy phenomenon. But he does not seem to lie aware that the combination in his own life of immorality with superstitious religious observances is every whit as incongruous, and compared with the conduct of peasantry, much less defensible. Con sidered as the practical issue of a dualism which separates theology entirely from all secular speculation, Montaigne's conduct affords no doubt an unsatisfactory comment on the principle of ' twofold truth.' On the whole, little can be said on the affirmative side of that frequent theme of French essayists — the Christianity, or religion, of Montaigne. For while he recogni/rd the ethical purity of Chris tianity, and preferred the simpler to the more complex stages in its historical evolution, there is little to demonstrate his appreciation of Christianity as a religion superior to all others. The ground of his Christianity he, expressly tells us, is geographical — the accident of his birth-place. The same accident might have made him a Brahmin or Buddhist, a Mussulman or Protestant; and he contem plates all such eventualities with the most philosophical indifference. Besides, he regarded all beliefs as capable of being determined by the arbitrary choice of those who adopt them. In his own words, 'many people make themselves believe that they believe'; and such an argument would hardly tend to demonstrate the exclusive sanctity of any established creed. Si'ine explanation too, of Montaigne's aberration from morality must be found in his definition and estimate of Nature. I have admitted the influence on his intellectual growth of Raymund of Sabieude's work. Now it is evident that the definition of Nature as a revelation prior and superior to that of Scripture, might in many cases assume a most mischievous aspect : that it did so in Montaigne's own case serins to me to admit of little doubt. Herein, too, our skeptic was not only pursuing a track set before him by a venerated teacher, but was in harmony with the general spirit of the time. As we have seen, one of the most salient products of the Renaissance was a substitution of natural dictates for theological dogmas. This feature is distinctly marked in the Essais. Montaigne frequently mentions Nature on terms of equality with God, and I need not point out the extreme licence such a standpoint might be made to justify. As a per contra to these indications of skepticism, speculative and practical, Montaigne's fellow-Romanists and defenders urge his atti tude of professed obedience and submission to the Church. They string together the orthodox passages of his Essais, or his translation of the Natural Theology. They gravely remind us of his regular atten dances at Mass, his kissing the Pope's toe, his pilgrimage to Loretto (when he happened to be in the neighbourhood), his devoutly crossing Montaigne. 473 himself whenever lie yawned, his expressions of disdain for Huguenots and Neologists of all kinds, his exemplary death, etc. ; but I confess that the combined force of all these arguments in proving Montaigne an orthodox Romanist does not seem to me very great. Like so many of the illustrious characters formed by the Renaissance, Montaigne was in reality a learned and skeptical pagan. His warmest sym pathies, personal and literary, were given to the giants of antiquity. Despising, like Machiavelli, the men and the thought of his own time, nothing gave him 'so much enjoyment as retiring to his study and communing with his beloved ancients. Then he forgot, for the time being, the religious wars that desolated hLs country, the tortures and cruelties perpetrated by Kings and Popes in the holy name of religion, the insolent and oppressive dogma-mongering that characterized all the churches of the time, Huguenot no less than Romanist, and banished tolerance, mutual sympathy from human existence. That Montaigne was not a Christian in the ecclesiastical sense of the term I am fully persuaded ; but I am far from supposing, as some writers have done, that he was a conscious hypocrite. He undoubtedly possessed as strong a sense of natural religion as was compatible with his wayward character, and he intermingled with it just as much observance of ecclesiastical rites as his birth in a Romanist country seemed to demand. That he was susceptible of religious impressions and feel ings many pages of his Essais fully prove. That they were lasting, or were allowed to become obtrusive, his character forbids us -to acknow ledge. As to the quiet composure with which he met death, that seems to me to harmonize with the philosophic serenity with which he encountered the changes and chances of life ; and has little effect either in demonstrating his Christianity or disproving his skepticism. The scene of his death-bed proves little more than the success that attended his efforts to imitate the imperturbable calm which he so much admired in ancient heroes and Stoics, e.g. Sokrates, Cato and Seneca. Such at least is my own opinion. For those who are inclined to make large inferences from this and other transient phases in Montaigne's life as to the strength of his Christianity, I would recom mend the adoption of the rule suggested by Ste Beuve, viz. to estimate Montaigne by the standard of value he himself would attach to the ratiocination ; no readier method could be suggested for proving their inconclusiveness. Indeed, in the final resort, we cannot do better than suspend our own judgments and accept Montaigne's own estimate of himself. His self-delineation as ' divers ct ondoyant ' has long attained in this respect the efficacy of a sacramental formula. No phrase could better describe that combination of waywardness and mobility that constituted his character, and writh the additional remark 474 Thc Skeptics of the French Renaissance. that they indicate in a thinker a peculiarity born of skepticism, we must allow them to stand as the final verdict on Montaigne. No account of Montaigne's skepticism would be complete that took no cognizance of the unique position occupied by his Eased a in the history of French Literature and Free-thought. All works of skepti cism have, as we know, a peculiarly awakening force; for the reason that all enquiry, as Abelard remarked, starts from doubt. Hence, in the whole of French literature the two works that attained the most ready and lasting celebrity were Montaigne's Exsai* and Descartes' Discourse oil M<-tliod\ and of these the former has had by far the greatest influence. No work written in the language has so much right to the appellation of 'classic,' none has permeated so fully not only the thought and literature, but also the style and language of the mr>rit xptr it tulle nation in Europe. Nor is this to be wondered at. It is the outcome of all that is most distinctive in French literature from its very earliest commencement. It represents the ccrve and bonhomie, the witty insolence and audacious candour that cha racterized the French Fabliaux of the middle ages; and which was subsequently reproduced by such prominent writers as La Fontaine and Voltaire. As the chief product of the French Renaissance it introduced to the French people and their tongue the many-sided wisdom of old Greece and Home. In contributing to this popular knowledge of the humanities, the Esxais effected more than any work in French literature. Montaigne's perpetual quotations from classical writers and his pithy comments on them, though sneered at by Malebranche and others, had the effect of a collection of 'elegant extracts ' from all the greatest writers of antiquity, at a time when classical knowledge, as a part of popular education, was in its infancy. The French seigneur in his chateau, the merchant in his oilice, the mechanic in his shop, might catch a flavour of them from this ' Brev iary of good fellows,' as Cardinal Duperron styled the Essais. Nor was this all. To the professional student of classical lore, the lawyer or the cleric, Montaigne's Easais taught discrimination or its rudi ments, in ancient learning ; for, as Villemain has pointed out, Mon taigne is in France the father of classical criticism — ' the great critic of the sixteenth century.' In his well-known chapter on Books (ii. chap. x.\ he gives under the form of his own literary preferences a dis criminative judgment of the writers of antiquity which, for the most part subsequent criticism has confirmed. But especially was Mon taigne the purveyor to his countrymen of the skeptical thought of the ancients ; for we must by no means measure the extent of his obliga tions, particularly as to skepticism, by his actual quotations. Indeed, on all subjects Montaigne was better at borrowing than repaying. Montaigne. 475 Hence the student who comes to the study of the Essais after a wide course of classical reading, is surprised, not at the number of Mon taigne's quotations, but at their fewness. As you remember, he apologizes in one place for his dislike to quotations. Some might suppose such an apology unneeded or ironical, but in point of fact it is well grounded. The unacknowledged plagiarisms in the Essais are far in excess of their admitted borrowing. This is especially the case where the writer has a doubtful reputation. To take one in stance ; he often cites Sextos Empeirikos, though generally without naming him. Indeed, I regard Montaigne as having first introduced the great legislator of Greek skepticism into the French language ; just as, according to Bayle, Gassendi introduced him in Latin to the learned. It may easily have been, however, that Montaigne was in debted for his own knowledge of Sextos to Henry Stephens' translation of the Hypoty poses, which was published in 1502. At any rate all the more important of Sextos's arguments may be found in the Essais, and not unfrequently whole portions of the Hypotij -poses are discovered to have been transferred bodily into its pages;1 and these plagiarisms, though inserted in Montaigne's usual irregular manner, are yet selected with so much skill that they would of themselves enable any diligent reader to gain a fair knowledge of the distinctive qualities of Greek skepticism. Nor is it only the ancient skeptics whom Montaigne thus lays under contribution. He is equally prodigal of excerpts and reasonings from those nearer his own time. Thus Cornelius Agrippa's De Yanitate appears to have supplied him with occasional argu ments, though Montaigne never mentions him.1 As thus summarizing the reasonings of most free-thinkers on the subject, and presenting them in a popular form, Montaigne must be regarded as the father of French skepticism. All subsequent free-thinkers of his own nation have borrowed from him more or less, though in fair requital of his own plagiarisms, not always acknowledging their obligations. A natural result of this position is that the Essais may be regarded as a kind of barometer of French skepticism. It has gone up or come down in popular estimation just as free-thought has been in the ascendant or the contrary — both ' rise ' and ' fall,' being also denoted by the number of its published editions. Immediately on their first publication, contemporaneous as it was with the full tide of the Renaissance free-thought, they achieved a considerable popularity, which continued till about the middle of the following century. Then, 1 This is especially true of portions of the Apology chapter. 2 E.y. in his account of the diversities of opinion as to the seat of the soul, Book ii. chap. xii. he seems to have copied Agrippa, De Vanitate, etc., chap, lii. 4/6 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. by the united opposition of Catholics, Port-Royalists, Pietists and Philosophers of the Malebranche school, the Essen's receded to ' zero.' But in the eighteenth century, under the reign of the Encyclopaedists, they again rose rapidly, until they stood at a higher point of pros perity than they had yet attained. With the fall of the Revolution and the rise of the first Empire, there was another declension in the value of the Essais • while a final upward movement set in with the general awakening of interest in her older writers which commenced in France during the third decade of the present century, and which still continues. At present Montaigne and his immortal work stand higher, both in popular and literary estimation, than at any former period, as is amply testified by the recent literature which has grown up around them. But Montaigne's services to the free culture of France has not been confined to purveying her skepticism. There is no subject on which succeeding writers have not copied him; and as the contents of the Essais are of a multifarious, encyclopedic character, Montaigne has long occupied the position of a kind of general referee on most points of literature and moral philosophy.1 To enumerate all the great names in French literature who have borrowed from the Essais would be to reckon up all their greatest thinkers and writers. Charron's Sagessc is only a systematic reconstruction of some of the Essais. Le Vayer borrowed from him, though without acknowledgment, as well as imitated servilely his method, frequency of classical citations, etc. Pascal, while he abused him, was not ashamed of an occasional theft from his pages. Of himself, together with other of the French 'moralists' — thus termed one might suppose more from their 'moral izing ' than their ' morals '—Montaigne is the parent. The epi grammatic cynicism and misanthropy of Rochefoucauld, the wise sententiousness of La Bruyere — their desultory method of teaching by disjointed maxims and pithy sentences, are derived from the Essais. To the great dramatists of France— Corneille, Moliere, Racine, especially the second— Montaigne has furnished both thought and language. Indeed his influence on these was so powerful that in one respect it may be accounted mischievous; for there is little doubt that the classical enthusiasm awoke by the Essais tended to repress the native originality of these writers by inducing a slavish deference to classical standards. Coining to later times, Montaigne in the eighteenth century is the paramount teacher of France. Rousseau 1 Comp. on this point Nisard, Histoire de la Litt. de la France, vol. i., and M. Leveaux's Etude aur lea Essais de Montaigne. The principal interest of the latter work consists in the parallelisms adduced between Montaigne and other authors. Montaigne, 477 took from the Essais his method of education, and much else; though, characteristically, without a thought of acknowledgment. The encyclopaedists and free-thinkers of the same period plundered the skeptical portions of the Essais without scruple ; while during the present century few of the eminent litterateurs of France could be named who have not been indebted for somewhat of manner or matter to him, whom the chief of them has eulogised as ' the wisest French man that ever lived.' A passing word must also be given to the influence exercised by the Essais on the style and diction of the French language. Like his book, Montaigne's style is — himself. In completest harmony with his versatility, nay. its very reflection is the careless, informal char acter of his diction. Never was instrument more happily attuned to the moods and requirements of the player. The variety of his themes, his discursive method of treating them ; the complete absence of anything like plan, system, uniformity — -all these are reflected and expressed by the easy, gracfeul, happy-go-lucky style of his Essais. He tells us that he waited upon accident for his themes and for the ideas they suggested, we might also add, and for the language, in which they were expressed. He took no more pains to study the due arrangement of words in a sentence than the orderly sequence of thoughts in an Essay. What came first to hand, whether thought, quotation, or verbal phrase, was mostly adopted. Provided the words clearly indicated his meaning he was fully satisfied ; and the remark able feature of it is that this accidental language should be so perfect ; that with such an unartificial construction of sentences, the style should be so limpid and clear, that it is not only impossible to mis take the author's meaning, but even to imagine any words by which that meaning could be better conveyed ; so that it has been truly remarked : ' Montaigne is the man of all others who knows least what he is going to say, and knows best how to say it.' ' But while ac knowledging this naivete as the distinguishing characteristic of Montaigne's language, it is by no means the only one. His style is varied, flexible and elastic; it partakes largely of the 'divers ct on- doyant ' character of the author. He has his grave as well as his pleasant moods ; can tune his instrument to the slow solemn music of religious and didactic exposition as well as to the wilder dithyrambs of intellectual restiveness and immoral licence. This is doubtless the secret, in part, of his immense influence upon all subsequent French literature. Every student finds in the Essais not only the subject matter of his choice but the diction best fitted to express it. Char- 1 Grim Diderot Correspondence (Ed. Gamier), i. p. 102. 47 S The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. acteristically, ho himself did not value his style any more than ho did his thoughts. He calls it antiquated, provincial, Grascon ; says that when he writes he puts away from him the company and re membrance of books, because he found that that they interfered with his own ; form,' and in the case of good authors depressed his courage.1 But we must here, as elsewhere, make allowance for Montaigne's ex cessive self-depreciation, and his humorous exaggeration of personal peculiarities. His admitted carefulness to preserve the individuality of his style seems to indicate that he deemed it worth preserving; and it is worthy of remark that the author whom of all French prose writers ho most eulogises, possesses that ' simple and natural ' style which comes nearest to his own, i.e. Amyot, the translator of Plutarch. Nor has Montaigne's incomparable language been without eft'elit in the diffusion of his skepticism. Every philosophy — like a line lady — is largely dependant for 'social success ' on its dress, style and mode of presentation ; and this is especially the case when Nature has not been lavish in her original gifts. Hence skepticism, not being blessed with very prepossessing features or beauty of form, has always been largely indebted for the measure of its popularity to the arts of the literary coiffeur and inodixtc ; and Montaigne's seductive graces of style has invested his philosophy with such attractions that, in my opinion, Pyrrhonism has never been so well dressed or so artistically presented as in the Ensals. As a teacher of philosophical suspense ho is even superior to Sextos Empeirikos; his quality of ; ondoiement,' his (l<'x*c certi.'1 ' Of things, inon arc suro altour, Surest of all is, doubt.' MRS. ARUXDEL. Or you might paint him like one of the Evangelists, attended by his proper symbol: a chameleon, perhaps. HARRIXGTOX. Whatever we ma}' say of the irony and mani fold meanings of the Exxaix, we must admit, I think, that sentences carved in wood carry with them an evidence of sincerity and bo ml /i// dcatJi} Imagine <>.-o facto, endangered, in dependently of the malice, or even of the existence, of Car pi 'liter ins. TREVOR. We shall be better able, perhaps, to mete out to Ramus's murderers their due proportion of guilt when we have examined more fully the nature and circumstances of the deed. At present the discussion is premature. Before considering our Skeptic's death, we must first contemplate the noble life which preceded it. Unhappily, there is a close and intimate 1 M. Waddington. it is true, says, that rn tho third day of the Massacre, the popular fury had become calmed, p. 25-4; but this is denied by Martin, Histoire de France, ix. p. 331, who says, ' La nuit (i.e. of August 24th) on egorgea dans les prisons ; le lendemain, le surlendemain le massacre contmua dans la ville avec une nouvelle fure.1 No doubt the king issued on the 26th an edict prohibiting further massrcrev, but, as Herr Soldau remarks, by that time few Huguenots were left. Sw La France et la Saint- Bar tMemy, translated by Schmidt, p. 87. Peter Ramns. 501 relation, not to say congruity, between the two ; for the tempest which finally submerged him was but the last and worst of a series of storms, with which, so far as his public career was concerned, he had to contend throughout his life. Yet if it be the glory of a warrior to die on the field on which he has fought so bravely, equal honour must be awarded to the philosopher who, in the cause of truth, yielded his life in a vain struggle with religious, philosophical, and political tyranny, and who fittingly closed his career on a blood-stained field, on which, it might have seemed, the Free-thought of France had also for the time been utterly vanquished and overthrown. Had either of us been on the direct road leading from Cutli,1 a small market town in the district of Vermandois in Picardy (between Xoyon and Soissons), to Paris, on eome spring or summer day of the year 1523, he or she might have chanced to see a boy with a bright intelligent face, but poorly clad, ami carrying a wallet at his back, trudging with naked feet in the direction of the capital. Such a sight was in those days not unusual. On any of the main roads lead ing to Paris youths, or perhaps I should say, children, from eight to ten years of age, might not unfrequently have been met with, some times in company with the carriers and traders to Paris, sometimes alone, begging their way to the University, animated by the Divine hanger of knowledge. But what rendered the spectacle a little more remarkable in the present instance was the evident poverty and friendlessness of the boy. AVe can readily imagine the expressions of sympathy he met with from the kind-hearted peasant women, from time to time, as lie humbly asked for bread, or to be told the road to Paris. The child we are thus supposing ourselves to have met was Peter Ramus (do la Ramee), whose father was a poor labourer dwell ing at Cuts, and whose grandfather had been a charcoal-burner. The family, though reduced, was of noble descent. The grandfather had once been a landed proprietor, but, like so many others in those troublous times, his patrimony had been desolated by the wars be- 1 On maps of France this place is gem-rally denominated Cuts, but there are no less than fourteen ways of spelling the word, which are duly enumerated by Waddirigton, Ttamii* .s-« vie, etc., p. '280. It is situated on the eastern boun dary of the Department of Oise, and a short distance from Noyon, the birth place of Calvin. VOL. II. G 502 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. tween France and Burgundy; and he was compelled to settle in Cuts, the district round which was then wild and wooded, and to adopt the trade of charcoal-burner.1 Both the present poverty and the former high descent of the family are discernible in the boy: one marked by the clothing, which is that of an ordinary peasant's child ; the other by features bold, vivacious and intelligent. Could we foresee the destinies of the }-oung scholar, we should find him in the course of a few years elevated to the foremost rank of the thinkers and teachers of the sixteenth century. At present, however, this is a distant and not very probable prospect. ... In due time the boy arrives at his destination, and we can imagine the bewilderment of the little Ficardian at the crowded streets, the great buildings, the grand spectacles of the capital. Nevertheless he makes the best of his way to some one or other of the many colleges comprehended within the university. He craves above all things knowledge, and the means of attaining it; but he also wants food and shelter. Un happily neither can bo obtained without money, and little Peter has none. Years after, when the little bare-footed Ficardian had become the head of a college and the foremost name in the University of Paris, his persistent attempts to establish gratuitous teaching in the university were, as we know, stimulated by the remembrance of his own youthful struggles, when he watched with wistful eye and long ing heart the students of the various colleges trooping into lecture rooms from which his poverty excluded him.2 Doubtless he offered 1 Otic of the many iiol)l<' traits in Uamus's character is the fearlessness with which he avows his humble origin, ami the poverty in which his early life was spent. In the discourse he delivered on his installation to a chair in the College of France, ir>r>l, he rec mnts the history of his family, and answers the, reproaches which had been levelled at its poverty in the true spirit of a Chris tian and a philosopher. 'I am,' he says, 'a Christian, and have never deemed p.tvertv an evil. I am not one of those Peripatetics (Aristotelians) who think that a man cannot do great things unless he possesses great riches.' He adds the prayer, ' O, Almighty God, this grandson of a charcoal-burner, and son of a labourer, this man weighed down by so many disgraces, — he does not ask Thee for riches, which would be useless to him for a profession whose only tools are paper and pen and ink ; but he implores Thee to grant him throughout his whole life an honest mind, and a zeal and perseverance which will never leave him.' Cf. Waddington, p. 18. We may well agree with the Duke of Anjou in Marlowe's Massacre of Paris, — ' Ne'er was there collier's son so full of pride.' But it is the pride which is born of humility, and is the genuine mark and attribute of true nobility of soul. - In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were public gratuitous lec tures on philosophy delivered in the Hue du Fuarre. See Crevier, Histoire de L' Unicersite, vi. p. 92; but these had fallen into disuetude before the accession Peter Ramns, 503 himself as servant to some of the better class of students who could afford such a luxury; but, so far as we know, without success. His ill-forttine may perhaps be ascribed, at least in part, to the social dis turbances of Franco and of Paris in the year 1523. Contemporary chroniclers inform us that the capital was the scene of continual and frightful disorders ; quarrels and murders were of almost daily occur rence ; 1 so that Ramus's first acquaintance with the city and her blood-stained streets afforded a gloomy foreboding of his own fate thirty-nine years after, when his mangled and dying body was drawn along the same streets and cast into the Seine. But whatever the cause, the boy's unwearied efforts were unsuccessful. At last, in despair he turned his face homewards to the labourer's cot in Picardy; where he was doubtless received with joy by his affectionate mother, and resumed for a time those rural occupations from which he had fled to Paris. How long he remained at home on this occasion we do not know; probably as long as his persistent will was able to suppress the cravings of intellectual restlessness. In time the latter again asserted their authority, and young Ramus once more left his father's house for Paris in quest of knowledge; unluckily this time also with out success. At last his mother's brother, a Carpenter in name and trade, but exceedingly poor, consented to receive him into his house. Young Peter remained with his uncle for some time, travelling with him to other parts of France to find employment ; and when these attempts failed, again returned with him to the capital. But the poor man was unable to maintain himself, and his sister was too poor to render him any assistance, consequently the boy was once more turned adrift and compelled to seek a new home. This he providen tially found. He engaged himself as servant, being now twelve j^ears of age, to a student in the College of Navarre, a certain M. de la Brosse.2 He had now reached the lowest step of the ladder which was destined to lead him to learning and fame. Domiciled among scholars, professors, and university lectures, ho at last breathed the of Francis I. (Waddirigton, p. 410). Ona of Ramus's projects of university reform, in after life, was the restoration of these street lectures on philosophy. See below, and compare on the character of the Schools of the Hue du Fuarre, MM. Le Clerc et Renan, Hist. Litt. de la France au I4me Siecle, vol. i. p. 284, ii. 79, 80. 1 Cf. Martin, Hlstoire de France, viii. 40. 2 This was the usual resource of poor students of the University of Paris in those days. Postol, a celebrated contemporary of U.nnus, and a liberal thinker like himself, began his studious life 111 the same way. — Waddington, p. 20. Comp. Mr. Bass-Mullinger's University of Cambridge (pp. 346, 817) for an interesting account of the manner in. which the poor scholars of that uni versity were wont to alleviate their poverty. 504 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. atmosphere for which ho so ardently panted. The young scholar immediately sot to work with all the indomitable pertinacity which marked his character, and the next eight or nine years of his life wore years of painful and arduous effort. Looking back on this period in after life, he givrs this noble retrospect of it: ' For many years T endured servitude of the hardest possible kind, but my mind lias ahvavs been free; that has never been sold or degraded : ' a boast of intellectual freedom of which we shall soon have an opportunity of estimating the value. His time he divided into two portions. The day he was compelled to devote to his master's service; the night, he was urged by a compulsion hardly less severe — the burning thirst fur knowledge— to spend in study. So that throughout the twenty- four hours the young student often allowed himself only throe hours' sleep.1 Ib' devised a kind of alarum, like that which Aristotle is said to have used for the same purpose, to rouse himself at midnight in order to pursue his studies. The consequence of this severe appli cation upon the growing youth was io have been expected; a serious attack of ophthalmia seized him, and for a long time retarded his progress. 1'nt ho no sooner recovered than he again set to work with renewed ardour. By dint of labours so persevering and un- coasing, he was rdile to pass through the curriculum of liberal arts3 required by the College of Xavarre ; three and a half years being afterwards devoted to a special course of philosophy. AVho his mas ters wore in other departments of study we have no means of know ing. His teacher in philosophy, M. Waddington conjectures to have been a certain Jean Uennuyor, who was a man of independent and liberal chai actor. * and probably helped Uamus forward in the path I On the hardships -which the poor students of the university wore accus tomed to undergo in the sixteenth century, sec the article 'Comment se 'iiisi.it une 'Education an XVI" siecle,1 in V a ride* Historiqitcs ct Littcraircs (Hibl. Fl/ev.), vol. x. pp. ir>l-li;(). -' The liberal arts consisted generally of the Tricinm (grammar, rhetoric, and logic), and the GO to the Bishopric of Lisienx. He seems to have been, if the ordinary tradition respecting him is to be credited, a bishop of the typ> of which history has left us examples in the two B irromei. and fiction in Victor Hugo's touching portrait of Monsei- gnenr Myriel. ' Bishop Ilennuyer had,' says Waddington, ' many Protestants in his dioc at the time of the St. Bartholomew, and he manifested as much zeal to sive them from massacre, as he had previously displayed to convert tin m in a peaceable mannor. . . . When the Lieutenant of the King com- Peter Rainus. 505 of free-enquiry lie had already marked out for himself. To me, I confess, guesses as to the teachers of a youth like Uamus seem rather superfluous. He was himself his own best master; and the teachings of others must have received. l>y his own vigorous analysis and origi nal intellect so thorough a recasting, that they could only have re tained ultimately the form he chose to assign them. Throughout life his motto was that of so many other skeptics, ' Unbelief is the begin ning of knowledge.' We come now to the period of Ramus's philosophical conversion, lie had been duly instructed in the logical treatises of Aristotle like every other of the thousands of youths who were deriving their mental nutriment from all the learned seminaries and teachers of municatcd to him the order to massacre the Huguenots, lie replied, "No. no, sir! 1 oppose and shall for ever oppose the execution of sach an order. I am the shepherd of Lisieux, and those whom you say you are commanded to kill are my sheep. Although the\- are now wandering and have left the fold which Ji sus Christ, the Koyai Shepherd, has cominitt< d to my care,, they may never theless return. I do not see in the Gospel that the shepherd should allow the lilooil of his sheep to be shed ; on the contrary I find that he is obliged to shed his o\vn blood and to give his life for them.'' Thereupon the governor de manded for his own discharge, a refusal in writing, which the bishop immedi ately gave him.' Such was the man who was Ramus's instructor — a fitting instrument to confirm and cherish, though he might not have originated, the germs of free-thought in his mind and heart. For a further account of the good bishop, conip. the Mcic/trc de France, October, 17 12. pp. 21'2-J-'J17i3, in which is recorded his epitaph. It was afterwards destroye I. The incident above relate, I was made the subject of a powerful drama in three acts by L. Sebastien Mercier, iu 1772. which was translated into English a fe\v years after under the title of ' Jean Hennuyer, Bishop of Lisieux ; or, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.' It should be added to the foregoing remarks, which were founded on the authorities above cited, that then.' sejms some reason to question the historical genuineness of this anecdote of Hennuyer; though it can plead the sanction of a local tradition of long standing. The question was lirst mooted in the Merctire de France (vol. ii. of June, 170-1), and (vol. i. of Dec., 17-10). Its fullest discussion, as against the anecdote.', is to be found in M. Dubois, Recherche* stir la, Normatidie, pp. 55-78. It may h.: said to consist of two ivasous : 1. A denial that Hennuyer was a tolerant man, which is bas ;d upon his opposition some years previously to a royal edict granting freedom of worship to Protestants. '2. Some grounds exist for believing that he was not at Lisieux, but at Paris, at the date of the massacre. Comp. Martin, Hialolre de France, vol. ix. p. oil, note. In his drama, La tiaint '^Barlheleniy, M. llemusat adopts a modified version of the story. Apparently accepting Henrmyer's absence from Lisieux as proved, he does not reject the old tradition of his opposition to the St. Bartholomew, but in a striking passage makes the bishop defend his Hock before the King and Catherine de MeJicis.— Cf. La tiainte Barthclciny, pp. 300-310. 506 77/6' Skeptics of the French Renaissance. Europe. Generally these dicta were received with as absolute sub mission as any dogma of the Church. Aristotle's Organon was the Apostle's Creed of philosophy — the wicket gate of all speculative thought. Its methods arid conclusions were to be received, not exa mined, still less denied. But llamus's intellect, as I have said, was by no means of the passively receptive order, nor was his native courage likely to be quelled by a mere name, even though so awful and infallible as that of Aristotle. Accordingly part of his own jirhrcfc philosophical course was devoted to a searching investigation of both the truth and utility of Aristotle's logic : but the story must be told in his own words, it is instructive as illustrating the skep tical intellect in the domain of pure philosophy. ' When I came to Paris,' he says, ' I fell into the subtleties of sophists, and was taught the liberal arts by questions and disputes. You (addressing his readers) may be luckier than I was. Amidst the clamour of the schools, where I passed so many days, so many months, so many years, never did I hear a word — one single word — on the applications of logic. I believed then (" the scholar ought to believe," he inter poses sarcastically, " for so Aristotle wishes ! ") I believed that I had no cause to distress myself about the nature of logic and the end it proposed to itself, but that the only thing needful was to make it the object of our clamour and disputes. Consequently I disputed and vociferated with all my might. . . . You will ask me perhaps when and how I finally discovered a better method? I will tell you, freely and candidly ; so that if the remedy which delivered me from a condition so wretched should be useful to you, you may employ it largely. I do not undertake to convince you by the reasoning.1 I only wish to explain to you truly and straightforwardly how I came out from that darkness. Having devoted three years and six months to the scholastic philosophy according to the rules of our academy — having read, discussed, and meditated on the different treatises of the Orc/anoUj . . . when I came to consider the years entirely occupied in the study of scholastic arts, I wanted to learn how I should afterwards apply the knowledge I had gained at the cost of so much labour and fatigue. I soon discovered that all this logic did not make me more learned in history and antiquity, nor more skilful in eloquence, nor a Jbetter poet, nor wiser in any respect. Alas ! miserable man, how greatly was I astonished ! how deeply did I sigh ! Ho\v did I accuse my deficiencies, how bemoan the misfortune 1 Compare the well-nigh ipsissima verba in which Descartes describes the object of his Discours de la Methode: 'My design is not to teach here the method which every one ought to follow in order to guide well his reason, but only to show the way in which I tried to guide my own.' Peter Ranms. 5°7 of my destiny — the barrenness of a mind wliich after so many labours could neither collect nor even perceive the fruits of that wisdom which it was alleged was found so abundantly in Aristotle's Logic. . . . At last I met with Galen's work on the opinions of Hippokrates and Plato.1 . . . That parallel of Plato and Hippokrates caused me great satisfaction ; but it inspired me with an. ardour still greater to read all the dialogues of Plato which treat of logic. ... It was then, to speak sooth, that I found the haven so long desired. That which I especially relished, that which I loved in Plato, was the method by wliich Sokrates refuted false opinions, attempting above everything to elevate his hearers above the senses, the prejudices, and the testimony of men, in order to lead them to their own natural sense of right, and liberty of judgment. For it appeared to him insane that a philosopher should let himself be led by the opinions of the vulo-ar, who for the most part are false and deceitful instead of O L applying himself to know only facts and their true causes. In short, I began to say to myself (I should have hesitated to say it to another), Well! what is to prevent my Sokratizmg a little, and examining, independently of Aristotle's authority, whether that doctrine of his logic is the most true and most useful. Perhaps that philosopher has abused us by his authority ; if so, I need not be surprised at my having studied his books without deriving profit from them, since they contain none. . . . What if all that doctrine should be false ! ' Such was the stupendous conclusion to which the young student had arrived, such was the process employed in attaining it. H;s biographer well points out the close similarity between this process and the method pursued by Descartes nearly a century afterwards. We, with our gallery of skeptics, can institute a larger comparison ; for we know that a similar method is common to many (I might say all) free-thinkers who possess sufficient mental originality and in dependence to enquire into the nature and authority of beliefs forced 1 The treatise Ilept TUV 'IiriroKparovs teat IlXarwros AoytMTuv. Galen opera, Ed. Kulm, v. p. 181, etc. The parallel between Hippokrates and Plato which thus aroused liamus from his Peripatetic slumber is thus enunciated by Galen in another work, 6epaweT. Me0o5oi>, I, Opera, Kulm, x. p. 14. 'Plato thought the nature of the mind was to be discovered by a similar method to that by which Hippokrates investigated the nature of the body.' Kamus's attention was also arrested by the tact that Galen bestows the title of the greatest dialectician not on Aristotle but on Plato. It may be added that in another place he ascribes his conversion to Sokratism to the medium of Xeiiophon : ' Ainsi estant en cest emoy, je tombe, comme conduit par quelque bon ange, en Xenophon, puis en Platon, ou je cogneus la Philosophic de Socrate.' — Remonstrance au Cornell Pried, p. 25. 508 77/6' Skeptics of t/ic French Renaissance. upon them from without. Besides his Aristotelian skepticism, llamus was, as you niny have noticed, on the very verge of the main principle of modern experimental science, as it was afterwards laid down by Bacon and Descartes. Unfortunately both the skepticism and the discovery were too premature to be effective. Aristotle and the School philosophy had imt yet ceased to reign in the universities of Europe, and the enormous power which they wielded, and the manifold in fluences, both lay and clerical, which they commanded, Ramus was soon able to test for himself. Having thus entered on a path of discovery, Ixamus was not the man to leave the question half investigated, nor, having arrived at a conclusion, was he at all disposed to shrink from its avowal — no matter what the consequences might be. He had ascertained, as he thought, that most of Aristotle's works were spurious, and that the few which had most claim to genuineness were full of falsehood. Nothing remained but to announce Ins conclusions boldly and uncon ditionally. This he accordingly did. On taking his degree of Master ot Arts, he was obliged to propound a thesis on some scholastic sub ject, which lie was required to defend for a whole day against all comers.1 He had the temerity, the ' bizarria (T hif/<',' as Tassoni calls it, to submit as his thesis the extraordinary paradox — All Ai-is- totlc ,s trrifiiirm to her teachings. The result of this was to give her conclusions a ratiocinative and trustworthy appearance they were far from really possessing, inasmuch as they were founded on premisses often purely arbitrary, or a priori, but of which, in any case, neither examination nor question was permitted. :i The Church conceived herself to 1 ' Aristotelos, more Ottomanorum regiiare se baud tuto posse putaret, nisi f ratres sues oiuucs contrucidasset.' De AUIJ. Set., iii. oh. 4. Ellis and Spedding, i. p. r>Gi3, where see note. Bacon repeats the comparison in his Treatise ' Do principiis atque originibus.' 2 Voltaire was apparently ignorant who the 'Paul' was to whom this re mark is ascribed; for speaking of its repetition by Pallavicini he says : 'Le Cardinal Pallavieini releve la maxime de je ne srus quel moine Paul qui disait plaisamment que, sans Aristote, 1'eglise aurait manque de quelques uns de ees Articles de Foi.' — Diet. PhUosoph., Art. ' Uiiiversite.' Bacon says that the remark \vas frequently made of the canons of the Council of Trent, 'That we are beholden to Aristotle for many Articles of our Faith.' — Apophthegms, 275. 3 Iii any doctrine of development, whether religious or scientific, no truth is 77/c' S/ct'/>/i('s of the I^rcnc/i Renaissance. possess already the needed materials: what she wanted \vas a scaffold ing l>y \vhich they might be, erected into a loftier, more systematic superstructure. This the treatises included in the ()rki-(tt<'x om ]»•<> unlit*,' Aristotle, or rather his mediaeval ghost, was also tacitly elevated among Christian saints and martyrs. He was stvled 'the forerunner of Christ in the Gentile, as John the Baptist in the Jewish world.' He was even said to be worthy of adoration; and he narrowly escaped canonization. To some thinkers it appeared that Christianitv itself was in danger of becoming a kind of hallowed Peripatetic-ism ; and Peter do Celle's fear that ' the forest of Aristotle ' r.iore frequently lost sight of than that the whole superstructure dep ,;iids upon a few elementary principles which must first be subjected to a rigid and fear less examination, (irant Father Newman his premisses, and the whole of his 'Essay 011 .Development ' b -comes a geometrical demonstration, so far as any moral argument can have such a coercive force. Similarly, grant an extreme Darwinian his first principles, and the world in its present form is accounted for. It was the boast of an early Greek thinker, 'Give me plenty of sun and mud, and I \vill undertake to evolve creation.' Archimedes is not the only boaster of what he would effect with an impossible ' Ads TTOU livres 13 sols: au doctorat en Medicine, SSI livres 5 so's; au doctorat en Theologie, 1002 livres; le tout sans compter le prix du premier lieu de la licence, qui se mettoit a 1'enchire, et qui se vendoit a proportion de Festime qu'en faisoient lesconcurrens.' llisfoire de VUnii-crx., vi. p. 91. There were other expenses incidental to degree-taking, for which see Dr. A. Budinozky, Die UniversitM Paris, etc. pp. 42, 43. 514 The Skeptics of the French Renaissance. there as well as at the College of Navarre.1 But. soon after, associat ing himself with two friends whom he had imbued with his ideas on University and Philosophical Reform, the three established them selves at the little college of Ave Maria, where under the direction of Ramus they instituted courses of public lectures. ' There,' says Waddington, ' for the first time in the University of Paris, Greek and Latin authors were read in the same class. For the first time, also, the study of eloquence was joined to that of philosophy ; and the poets and orators were explained together.' 2 These novel lectures were attended with the most brilliant success. Xo doubt the initiation of this varied and entertaining teaching was part of Ramus's anti- Aristotelian strategy. He, like other Humanists, had discoveed the truth that breadth of culture is the best antidote to the exclusive preponderance of any one mode of thought. The crowded lecture rooms of Ave Maria were a clear proof that the teaching there supplied a want which had become urgent in the university. But like Abelard, and Pomponazzi, the young lecturer had to pay for his success. Peripatetic teachers who had spent a lifetime in expound ing Aristotle's Logic could hardly view with equanimity the desertion of their meals of syllogistic dry bones for the richer and more nutri tious fare which Ramus and his friends supplied. Thus was ori ginated the bitter strife between the Aristotelians and Ramus which lasted during his life, and was instrumental in compassing his death. Concurrently with this teaching of others, our Skeptic began to unteach himself, by submitting to a rigorous analysis all the methods and acquirements which his university education had forced tipon him. He estimated that this destructive process cost him as much time as the converse labour of construction had done.:! In the year 1543, Ramns published two works on the subjects of Logic and Aristotle. The first of these was called Division of Logic (Dialectics Partitioncs\ the second Animadversions on Aristotle (Arintoteliccc Animadvcrsiones). The object of the latter was, appa rently, to put forth in a deliberate form the attacks on Aristotle for which he had already signalized himself; but the spirit in which this was done had unhappily little to commend it, for the treatise is full of the blind and furious invective which marked the controversy of that age, and was also quite in harmony with Ramus's fierce im petuosity. There are some remarkable sentences in the book which 1 According to Du Boulay, Hint. Univ. Par., vi. 952. Ramus was Professor of Philosophy at these t\vo colleges. 2 Of. M. Waddington, p. 33." 3 Waddington, p. 3.1, who adds, 'Grand labeur assur^meat, et dont peu d'hommes se sont montres eatables.' Peter Ravins. r z - show the author's courage and his full recognition of the perils to which lie was exposing himself.1 He boldly avows that lie is not only prepared to encounter all labours and dangers in order to destroy the sophisms of his enemies, who are also enemies of the truth, but lie must accept, if need be, a brave and glorious death in the cause. To take however some precautions against contingencies so dire, he dedicated the Divisions of Logic to the king, while he chose' as patrons of the Animadversions two future cardinals, Charles of Bourbon, then Bishop of Xevers, and Charles of Lorraine, who, since the age of eight years had been Archbishop of Rheims, both of whom had been Ramus's fellow-students at the College of Navarre. The excitement evoked by this second attack on Aristotle exceeded that which attended and followed his defence of his degree-thesis.2 The Rector of the University was the first to step forward to vindi cate its philosophical orthodoxy.3 Ramus was cited before the Provost of Paris as an enemy of religion and a disturber of the public peace, and like Sokrates, he was further charged with corrupting the minds of youth by imbuing them with a dangerous love of novelties. The cause was removed by request to the High Chamber of the liament, whence it was withdrawn by the king into his own He appointed a Royal Commission to investigate the matter, consisting of five members ; two nominated by Ramus's accusers two by himself, while the fifth (De Salignac) was the king's own nominee and as jt happened a bitter enemy of Ramus. The issue of such an unequal contest maybe imagined.'1 Both the friends and his cause 'La,' says Waddington, in quoting these sentences, ' Ramus se declarait hardiment 1'adversaire de la routine, et le defenseur de la liberte de penser :s partisans aveugles de Fautorite en philosophie.'— p. 40. - This extraordinary panic is thus described in a little-known work A Din course on Logomachy, by S. Werenfels (Eng. Trans., 1717, pp 84-37): 'This the publication of Ramus's books) was highly resented bvsome of the Univer sity ; who, judging if Aristotle's authority was once called in question their own could not be over-secure, chose Anthony Govean, an eminent lawyer for their champion, began to rage and rail, and stuck at nothing that might serve to run down Ramus's Noveltys (as they call'd 'em). When they found all LS would not do, away they trudge puffing and blowing to Parliament be- em by all that was good to forbid the reading of these pernicious book," Alas Hannibal was at the gates, and nothing but death and destruction at Well, even this was not thought a sufficient remedy. Nothino- would serve but his most Christian Majesty Francis I. must be judge in this weighty lebate (and very well worth his while you may be sure 'twas). He submitted to it, and ordered five Persons to hear the Point debated.' 3 SJG the Rector's ownsantiments on the question in D'Ar-entre Collectio Judiciarum, i. p. 131. 4 See the whole proceedings, which lasted for some time, in Wad Jin "ton pp. 41-58. Bayle, Diet., Art, ' llamu*J Note D. 516 T/ic Skeptics of t lie French Renaissance. were in a hopeless minority, and were equally subjected to a pitiless brow-beating. Ultimately, on the 1st of March, 1544, the three anti- Ramists (for Ramus withdrew his two friends), pronounced their decision : they determined that Ramus had acted rashly, arrogantly and impudently, inasmuch as he had tried to condemn and vilify that method of logic which was received among all nations; further, in order to benefit literature, they decreed that the book should bo suppressed as completely as possible, as well as the other work entitled Inxf /'tut/on* of Lay i.e., which also contained many impcrti- nencies ami 1'alsehoods.1 This 'admirable refutation of a logician,' as M. Waddington terms it, was confirmed by a royal mandate, which prohibited under severe penalties the printing, publication, or sale of the books in question, and also forbad Ramus to read or lecture in any manner whatsoever, without the king's express permission ; and further enjoined him to cease employing such slanders and invectives against Aristotle. The decree was' received by the Anti-Ramists with a wild exultation, which seems utterly preposterous on such an occasion,2 but which mav serve as a measure of the enlightenment which the University of Paris possessed in the middle of the sixteenth century, as well as of the fanaticism arrayed against Ramus. 'When they had succeeded in tying his tongue and his hands, and taken from him every means of defence against the attacks of his enemies, then how noisily did they exult at so fine a victory!'3 is the sarcasm of his friend and biographer, Omer Talon. v The condemnation, printed in Latin and in French, was scattered profusely throughout the city; it was ' The sentence is thus given by Dti Boulay, Iflxt. Hm-. Farix, vi. 304. • • • 'Xos diligenter perleeto libro ft singulus ejus animadversis ac ponderatis scn- tentiis ita censuimus: Ramum trmp.re, arroi/antcr, ct impudenter fecisse, qui receptam apud onmes nation.* logioe artis rationem, (iiiam ipse prsesertim mm tenent, damnaro ft irnprobare, voluerit : ea autem qutB in Aristotele reprehendebat, hujusmodi esse, ut honiinis cum ignorantiam et stupor«m turn in.probitatciu ct malitiam ar-uant, qunm. et niulta quse verissima suiit crimint-tur. et pleraqne tribuat Aristoteli (Lu'2, sixth part of the whole population of France were Huguenots. In Paris itself tin- numlicr was givat. We are told that upwards of 8,000 used to assemble at the Pre-au-Clercs at midnight to sing the psalms of Marot's translation. Ciwier, op. cit., vol. vi. p. (j">. Cf. 1L Martin, Ilixt. ilc France, ix. 1 See Martin, Hi*it>ir<- (>S, Imt it was to find his place at the College of Presles occupied, his o\vn library pillaged, and his book shelves empty. Nor were these the only bitter ingredients in his cup. The immediate future was threatening a renewal of the civil war; accordingly he obtained permission from the king to travel in Switzer land and Germany, and to visit the, chief academies in those coun tries, intending probably to await better times and a imro durable peace. But before leaving Paris lie gave a remarkable proof of his disinterestedness and magnanimity. For, notwithstanding the cruel treatment ho had recently uud.Tg mo, he made his will — seated, per haps, in that very study that had been wrecked, and in sight of his empty bookshelves — bequeathing the greater part of his hardly-earned savings to the University,1 as an endowment for a mathematical pro fessor in the College of France. Even (Vevier is struck at the date of this transaction, and admits that it adds immeasurcably to the glory of the Founder. I do not know that we need follow llamus on what might be called his triumphal progress through the chief university towns of Europe. Everywhere his fame had preceded him: and he was welcomed with open arms, not only by co-religionists as a learned Protestant, but by men of culture as a celebrated thinker on whom they had long since conferred the title of the French Plato. Several towns and princes would fain have retained him in their service by presenting him to professorships magnificently endowed. But llamus was proof against these temptations. His patriotism combined with his attachment to the College of Presles, exercised on him an invincible, and, as it proved, a fatal fascination; and immediately on the conclusion of the paace he once more hurriedly returned to Paris and — to death. During his absence his enemies had been busy. The influence of 1 ' Sur ma rente annuelle d ' s 'pt c aits livr -s a 1'h'itel de ville de Paris, j'en legue cinq cents pour le traitcmi'iit d'un Professor de Mathematique-i' etc. S •(• the whole document in Waddington, p. 32G, and comp. Crevier Hint. dp. riTnircrsite, vi. p. 230. It is satisfactory to learn that somj of the most eminent mathematicians of France occupied the chair thus nobly founded until the suppression of the University (with much besides) in 1771, e.g. Ro- berval, (lusseiidi, etc. G.iillard, remarking on this addition by llamus to the foundation of Francis I., by whom he had been so harshly treated, says, ' Ainsi le seul savant meconner par Francois I. est le seul qui ait ete digne d ; 1'imiter et de perfectionner son ouvrage.' — Hint, de Francois I., vii. p. 37a The effect of Ramns's munificence in foreign countries is incidentally illustrated by an entry in our Calendar of State Papers, ' Domestic,' 1581-1590 p. 169, where •we read: 'Richard Hakluyt the preacher at Paris to Sir Fr. Walsyn^ham, strongly recommends the establishment of a prize-lecture at Oxford on the Art of Navigation, similar to the one founded at Paris for mathematics, by that most worthy scholar Peter Ramus.1 Peter Ramus. 531 the League siding with Carpentorius, the Jesuits and the Romish fanatics of the University had procured from the court different de crees which forbad the holding of any chair in the University or the Royal College by any one except Romanists.1 On his arrival therefore, Ramus found his Principalship at the College of Presles and his chair at the Royal College held by two men of whom history has not thought it worth while to record their names, and whom therefore M. Waddington calls ' anonymous talents.' Ramu3 appealed to the court, and to his former patron the Cardinal of Lorraine, urffino- his 7 O O long services to the University, but in vain. He was compelled to retire from the offices and chairs he had so long adorned, and to which he had given an European reputation, and to withdraw into silence and a private life. As his work at Paris was now clearly at an end, he had some idea of seeking an asylum for his declining years at Geneva; and he wrote to Beza to sound him on the subject; but that redoubtable hierarch— the worthy successor of the murderer of Ser- vetus— received the proposal so coldly that Ramus could only regard it as a refusal. However, in 1570 he experienced one parting gleam from the declining sun of his good fortune before it finally embedded itself in the murky clouds which already hovered round its setting. The Cardinal Charles de Bourbon was made Chancellor of the Uni versity ; and to him Ramus applied with more success. Through his influence with the Queen Mother he obtained some modifications of the decree which excluded Ramus from the University. Without being permitted to interfere in the college teaching, he was allowed to retain the title of President; and his salary as such was doubled. His intention now was to complete the teaching he had proposed to himself by his pen, as he was unable to do so by his tongue. This scheme was favoured by the court and welcomed with enthusiasm by all men of thought and culture. With a happy reference to his name (Ramus being Latin for a branch or twig) as well as to " that golden twig"- which guided ^Eneas through the nether world, contemporary 1 Of the grounds of that prohibition, which were vehemently urged by the Cardinal of Lorraine and tlu Hector of the University, Crevier says, 'Le Eoi ecouta cette sage et pieuse " representation " '—not ' reclamation,' as M. Wad- dington quotes the word, p. 222. See Crevier, Hist, de VUnivem., vi. p. 259. 2 ' Ille aureus Ramus.' Vergil, ^Eneid, vi. ver. 137, etc. Besides the pun on the name, the application of Vergilian topics and phrases to things and per sons of a later age was quite in harmony with the medieval tendency to allegorise every portion of Vergil's works, treating them— as the English Puritans did the Hebrew prophets— as authoritative repositories of types, symbols, mysteries, allegories, etc. The Commentary of Servius— the great authority in the middle ages on the subject of Vergil-is full of these allegori cal renderings. See on the whole subject Prof. Comparetti's learned treatise, Virgilio nel Medio evo, vol. i. p. 78, etc. 532 77/6' Skeptics of the French Renaissance. poets celebrated the scheme of our philosopher as opening up un known realms and bright vistas of science. Hero c.